Paper ID: 2311.16989

ChatGPT's One-year Anniversary: Are Open-Source Large Language Models Catching up?

Hailin Chen, Fangkai Jiao, Xingxuan Li, Chengwei Qin, Mathieu Ravaut, Ruochen Zhao, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty

Upon its release in late 2022, ChatGPT has brought a seismic shift in the entire landscape of AI, both in research and commerce. Through instruction-tuning a large language model (LLM) with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, it showed that a model could answer human questions and follow instructions on a broad panel of tasks. Following this success, interests in LLMs have intensified, with new LLMs flourishing at frequent interval across academia and industry, including many start-ups focused on LLMs. While closed-source LLMs (e.g., OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude) generally outperform their open-source counterparts, the progress on the latter has been rapid with claims of achieving parity or even better on certain tasks. This has crucial implications not only on research but also on business. In this work, on the first anniversary of ChatGPT, we provide an exhaustive overview of this success, surveying all tasks where an open-source LLM has claimed to be on par or better than ChatGPT.

Submitted: Nov 28, 2023