# Introduction

OpenAssistant is a chat-based assistant that understands tasks, can interact
with third-party systems, and retrieve information dynamically to do so.

It can be extended and personalized easily and is developed as free, open-source
software.

## Our Vision

We want OpenAssistant to be the single, unifying platform that all other systems
use to interface with humans.

## Principles

- We put the human in the center
- We need to get the MVP out fast, while we still have momentum
- We pull in one direction
- We are pragmatic
- We aim for models that can (or could, with some effort) be run on consumer
  hardware
- We rapidly validate our ML experiments on a small scale, before going to a
  supercluster

## Main Efforts

- Data Collection Code → Backend, website, and discord bot to collect data
- Instruction Dataset Gathering → Scraping & cleaning web data
- Gamification → Leaderboards & more, to make data collection more fun
- Model Training → Experiments on pseudo- and real-data
- Infrastructure → Collection, training, and inference
- Data Collection → This is the bulk of the work
- Data Augmentation → Making more data from little data
- Privacy and Safety → Protecting sensitive data
