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- Hacker News
- OpenWebUI and similar ChatGPT-lite interfaces are a bad UI/UX for LLMs. "Normies" should not be using local models and those who want local models should be exposed to the settings/complexity that projects like oobabooga/sillytavern/comfyUI force a user to educate themselves about (i.e. LLM sampler settings, chat templates, etc). It's telling that the best AI generated content is made by people using these prosumer style projects, and not using simplified trash like OpenWebUI.
The proliferation of bad UI in consumption of AI systems has done unfathomable damage to discoverability of LLM features, especially new innovations in LLMs like far better sampling algorithms (i.e. min_p). Users are massively harmed by the features they don't know about and wish they were using but don't/can't because they are shepherded into the most brain-dead simple UI possible.
by Der_Einzige - If we had a society of actual engineers and hackers, sure.
However, LLMs for the vast majority of people are simple chatbot oracles. The people paying exorbinant wealth in investments are aiming for essentially the Apple of AI where it magically just works and creates a new market to redefine the paradigm.
LLMs are yet again another cyclical cycle where ideas influence material reality and vice versa. Magic is seen to be worth more than the wizard and his tools behind the curtain. The market is hoping that the masses don't find out about the wizard and his tools, so the illusion can continue to live and provide the basis for dreams.
Open WebUI also lets you tweak those parameters, BTW.
by CrackerNews - I wonder if there are similar projects like this but built on top of something like the cline sdk, opencode or acp?by nsonha
- I’ve created a native, cross-platform ollama client in Qt C++ called Vox (https://get-vox.com). For those interested, you can join the waitlist.by rubymamis
- I've always thought it was incredibly rude to call this project something as incredibly generic as "Open WebUI". For one it's impossible to find documentation because it's so generic as tl be utterly meaningless, and also you're intentionally confusing any and all open web UI projects past and future.
Not to mention it's just janky and hard to work with. And of course every bit of the official documentation is LLM slop. The only way I've been able to navigate is to use another LLM to tell me what these settings are for. Said LLM, having ingested the LLM slop documentation, also produces garbage that's barely correct.
It's a bad project.
- Isn’t openwebui also oss?by kosolam
- Hustlers will always hustleby brazukadev
- They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks [1], in their own words [2]:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_we...
by mythz - I hoped that someone would fork OpenWebUI before the license change an maintain a OSS Version. Like Valkey¹ is the OSS Fork of Redis and OpenSearch² is the OSS Fork of ElasticSearch.by randomtoast
- It is honestly ridiculous that "Open WebUI" made it past the US trademark office.
https://www.trademarkia.com/open-webui-99027970
If somebody forks this project, I dare you to name it "Open Open Web UI". If they threaten you, just rename to "Open WebAI", "Open UI Web", and other permutations, until their legal budget runs dry.
Clearly this company is following OpenAI's playbook- start with lofty OSS ideals, put "open" in your name, then fall down a slippery slope.
by evv - That might still be an option, all code before a license change falls under the license at that time.
A new license legally becomes active once it has been made public (i.e. it is committed to the source tree) and is not retroactive (for legal reasons).
And because of this, unless the owner/maintainer is willing to nuke a huge chunk of the history within their public repository (with all repercussions which might come with it) it is still possible to make a safe fork of a open source / open core product suddenly moving into a different direction. Time travel to the point before the new license was added to the repository, and fork from that point in time.
The owner/maintainer involved might absolutely not like that but legally they have no choice to allow it, given the license and its permissions at that particular moment in time in the repo.
by mindcrash - It would be good to share other OSS alternatives here, some alternatives I've seen mentioned in Reddit threads:
- jan.ai - librechat.ai - AnythingLLMby mythz - https://github.com/agent0ai/agent-zero
I'm leaning towards this one myself but I'm still early in researching alternatives.
- Witsy is very good.
* https://github.com/nbonamy/witsy
They don't really do a good job describing the features, but you can use it for any OpenAI compatible local API as well (llama.cpp, koboldcpp, etc).
by Eisenstein - GitHub links:
- https://github.com/janhq/jan
by bdhtu - How does this compare to the already established open source solutions such as Chatbox (https://github.com/chatboxai/chatbox), or Lobechat (https://github.com/lobehub/lobe-chat)?
Been using both, like Chatbox for how snappy it is, but is local only, vs Lobechat which allows you to setup centralized host to have shared host across clients but feels a bit clunkier.
by asnyder - One of the biggest differences I noticed off the bat is llms includes prompt caching which I'm not sure I've seen in any other self hosted UI optionsby CryptoBanker