Open-Assistant/docs/docs/faq/faq.md

Questions about the project

How far along is this project?

We are in the early stages of development, working from established research in applying RLHF to large language models.

Can I install Open Assistant locally and chat with it?

The project is not at that stage yet. See the plan.

What is the Docker command for?

Only for local development. It does not launch an AI model.

Is an AI model ready to test yet?

Not yet. The data you help us collect now through https://open-assistant.io/ will be used to improve it.

What license does Open Assistant use?

The code and models are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Is the model open?

The model will be open. Some very early prototype models are published on HuggingFace. Follow the discussion in the Discord channel #ml-models-demo.

Which base model will be used?

It's still being discussed. Options include Pythia, GPT-J, and a bunch more.. You can follow the discussion in the Discord channel #data-discussion.

Can I download the data?

You will be able to, under CC BY 4.0, but it's not released yet. We want to remove spam and PII before releasing it.

Who is behind Open Assistant?

Open Assistant is a project organized by LAION and individuals around the world interested in bringing this technology to everyone.

Will Open Assistant be free?

Yes, Open Assistant will be free to use and modify.

What hardware will be required to run the models?

There will be versions which will be runnable on consumer hardware.

How can I contribute?

If you want to help in the data collection for training the model, go to the website https://open-assistant.io/. If you want to contribute code, take a look at the tasks in GitHub and grab one. Take a look at this contributing guide.

Questions about the model training website

Can I use ChatGPT to help in training Open Assistant, for instance, by generating answers?

No, it is against their terms of service to use it to help train other models. See this issue. ChatGPT-like answers will be removed.

What should I do if I don't know how to complete the task as an assistant?

Skip it.

Should I fact check the answers by the assistant?

Yes, you should try. If you are not sure, skip the task.

How can I see my score?

In your account settings.

Can we see how many data points have been collected?

There's no public interface for that yet. However, some updates are posted periodically in the #general-discussion Discord channel. Search for count.

How do I write and label prompts?

Check the prompting guide.

Where can I report a bug or create a new feature request?

In the GitHub issues.

Questions about developing

Docker-Compose instead of Docker Compose

If you are using docker-compose instead of docker compose (note the " " instead of the "-"), you should update your docker cli to the latest version. docker compose is the most recent version and should be used instead of docker-compose

For more details and information check out this SO thread that explains it all in detail.

Enable Docker's BuildKit Backend

BuildKit is Docker's new and improved builder backend. In addition to being faster and more efficient, it supports many new features, among which is the ability to provide a persistent cache, which outlives builds, to compilers and package managers. This is very useful to speed up consecutive builds, and is used by some container images of OpenAssistant's stack.

The BuildKit backend is used by default by Compose V2 (see above).
But if you want to build an image with docker build instead of docker compose build, you might need to enable BuildKit.

To do so, just add DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 to your environment.

For instance:

export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1

You could also, more conveniently, enable BuildKit by default, or use Docker Buildx.

Pre-commit

We are using pre-commit to ensure the quality of the code as well as the same code standard.

The steps that you need to follow to be able to use it are:

    # install pre-commit in your python environment
    pip3 install pre-commit

    # install pre-commit in your github configuration
    pre-commit install

So from now on, in your next commits it will run the pre-commit on the files that have been staged. If there has been any error, you will need to solve that, and then stage+commit again the changes.

Docker Cannot Start Container: Permission Denied

Instead of running docker with the root command always, you could create a docker group with granted permissions (root):

    # Create new linux user
    sudo groupadd docker

    # Add the actual user to the group
    sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

    # Log in the group (apply the group changes to actual terminal session)
    newgrp docker

After that, you should be able to run docker: docker run .. In the case you still are not able, can try to reboot terminal:

    reboot

Docker Cannot Stop Container

If you try to shut down the services (docker-compose down), and you are getting permission denied (using root user), you can try the following:

    # Restart docker daemon
    sudo systemctl restart docker.socket docker.service

    # And remove the container
    docker rm -f <container id>

Docker Port Problems

Oftentimes people already have some Postgres instance running on the dev machine. To avoid port problems, change the ports in the docker-compose.yml to ones excluding 5433, like:

1. Change db.ports to - 5431:5431.
2. Add POSTGRES_PORT: 5431 to db.environment
3. Change webdb.ports to - 5432:5431
4. Add POSTGRES_PORT: 5431 to db.environment
5. Add - POSTGRES_PORT=5432 to backend.environment
6. Change web.environment.DATABASE_URL to postgres://postgres:postgres@webdb:5432/oasst_web