Awesome Free Models

A curated list of free AI models, APIs, and tools you can use without paying a cent.

✅ All links re-verified on October 1, 2026 (343 unique links). (Poe/Reddit/Perplexity/chat.mistral.ai return HTTP 403 — they block automated checks, not real users; api.oriper.com HTTP 530 and glhf.chat HTTP 522 remain unreachable; Common-Corpus and OpenImageGen on Hugging Face return HTTP 401 and may require authentication). Corrections this run: ZeroLimitAI is back up (HTTP 200) but its "free tier" is only a 3-day trial — permanent use is a $99 one-time purchase; AI21's trial is $10 for 7 days, not 3 months; BenchLM now tracks 508 models, not 281; FreeLLM.net tracks 505+. OpenRouter's free lineup is ~20 models right now.

Running AI shouldn't require a credit card. This list curates genuinely free models — open-weight models you can self-host, free API tiers from major providers, and tools to run everything locally.

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Contents

• 🧠 Open-Weight Models — Downloadable model weights you can run on your own hardware
• 🔌 Free API Providers — Cloud APIs with generous free tiers for model inference
• 🖼️ Image & Video Generation — Open-weight and API-based visual generation models
• 🔀 Free API Routers — Unified gateways routing requests across multiple providers
• 💻 Local Inference Tools — Software to run models locally with full privacy
• 💬 AI Chatbot UIs — Self-hosted web interfaces for chatting with models
• 🎵 Audio & Speech Models — Open-weight TTS, STT, and voice generation models
• 🤖 AI Coding Assistants — IDE extensions and CLI tools for AI-assisted development
• 📝 Code Models — Models specialized for code generation and analysis
• 🧬 Embedding Models — Models for semantic search, RAG, and text representation
• 🔍 RAG & Vector Databases — Vector storage and retrieval for augmented generation
• 🧩 Agentic Frameworks — Frameworks for building autonomous AI agents and multi-agent systems
• 🔧 MCP Servers & Tools — Model Context Protocol servers connecting AI to external tools
• 🎛️ Fine-tuning Tools — Tools for adapting models to your specific data
• ✨ Prompt Engineering Tools — Tools for testing, managing, and optimizing prompts
• 📊 LLM Evaluation & Observability — Tracing, evaluation, and monitoring for LLM apps
• 📊 Datasets — Open datasets for training, fine-tuning, and evaluation
• ☁ Model Hosting Platforms — Free cloud platforms for hosting and running models
• 📚 Learning Resources — Free courses, tutorials, and guides for AI engineering
• 🏆 Resources & Leaderboards — Benchmarks, leaderboards, and model discovery tools
• 👥 Communities — Discord servers, subreddits, and forums for discussion

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🧠 Open-Weight Models

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Notable open-weight models you can download and run on your own hardware.

• Muse Glimmer (Meta Superintelligence Lab) — Aug 2026. 30B dense multimodal model distilled from Muse Spark for local agentic workflows. Multi-step reasoning, tool use, vision, and failure recovery on consumer hardware (4-bit quant fits 24GB VRAM). 131K context. Apache 2.0.
• Llama 4 Scout / Maverick — Meta's latest MoE generation. Scout: 109B, 10M context. Maverick: 402B, 1M context. Native multimodal. [License]
• DeepSeek V4 Pro — Apr 2026. 1.6T MoE (49B active). SWE-bench Verified 80.6% (top open-weight). 1M context. MIT license.
• DeepSeek V4 — Core generation with extreme cost-efficiency. 1M context. MIT license.
• DeepSeek-V4-Flash — Apr 2026. Efficiency-focused variant. 284B total (13B active). 1M context. MIT license.
• Gemma 4 31B / 26B MoE / E4B / E2B — Fully permissive Apache 2.0. 256K context, native multimodal. New standard for open-weight.
• Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) — Jul 2026. 975B MoE (41B active). Leading US open-weight model. Native multimodal (text, image, audio). Apache 2.0. 1M context.
• GLM-5.2 (Zhipu AI) — 744B MoE model optimized for autonomous coding and engineering tasks. 1M-token context. MIT license.
• LongCat-2.0 (ByteDance) — Large-scale open-weight model for heavy agentic coding. MIT license.
• MiniMax M3 — Frontier-tier 1M context, native multimodal + computer use. MSA architecture.
• Trinity (Arcee AI) — 400B parameter enterprise model. Apache 2.0.
• Step 3.7 Flash (StepFun) — May 2026. Apache 2.0. Native multimodal (image+video), strong agentic performance. Efficient enough for high-end local hardware.
• Kimi K3 (Moonshot AI) — Jul 2026. 2.8T-parameter MoE (896 experts, ~50B active). World's largest open-weight model. 1M context, native vision + video. #1 Frontend Code Arena. Modified MIT license. Weights released Jul 27.
• Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot AI) — Apr 2026. 1T-parameter MoE model. Modified MIT license. Exceptional coding (SWE-Bench ~54%) and multi-agent swarm orchestration.
• Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B — Apr 2026. MoE variant with only 3B active parameters. Extremely efficient for consumer hardware. Apache 2.0.
• InternLM 3 (Shanghai AI Lab) — Early 2026. Strong long-context reasoning and agentic performance. Competitive in open-weight benchmarks.
• MiMo-V2.5-Pro (Xiaomi) — Apr 2026. 1.02T-parameter MoE (42B active). Optimized for complex agentic tasks, coding, and long-context.
• Kimi K2.7 Code (Moonshot AI) — Jun 2026. 1T MoE specialized for long-running coding agents. +21.8% over K2.6 on coding benchmarks. Modified MIT.
• Nemotron 3 Super (NVIDIA) — May 2026. 120B total (12B active). 1M context. Published weights, data, recipes, and eval infra. NVIDIA Open Model License.
• Phi-4 14B (Microsoft) — 2025. Compact 14B dense model. Strong reasoning and code. MIT license. Excellent for on-device and small deployments.
• Bonsai 8B (PrismML) — Apr 2026. Groundbreaking 1-bit quantized model. Extremely efficient for edge and consumer hardware (Apple Silicon).
• Aether-7B-5Attn (VIDRAFT) — Jul 2026. 100% open foundation model (weights, data, code, logs). 7B MoE (~3B active) with heterogeneous attention. Apache 2.0.
• Mistral Large 3 (Mistral) — Jun 2026. 675B MoE (41B active). European multilingual flagship. Frontier-class reasoning, native multimodal. Apache 2.0.
• Mistral Small 3.1 (Mistral) — Mar 2025. Versatile 24B multimodal model. Strong text performance with native image understanding and 128K context. Apache 2.0.
• Mistral Small 4 (Mistral) — Mar 2026. Hybrid MoE (6.5B active params) unifying instruction, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities. Efficient frontier-class model. Apache 2.0.
• Command A+ (Cohere) — May 2026. Enterprise multimodal MoE optimized for sovereignty and multilingual RAG across 48 languages. Apache 2.0.
• Apertus 1.5 (ETH Zurich / EPFL) — Jul 2026. Fully open LLM (weights, data, training code). 8B and 70B with image understanding, thinking mode, and tool use. Apache 2.0.
• Hy3 (Tencent) — Jul 2026. 295B MoE (21B active). Strong reasoning and agentic performance. Competes with models 2-5x its size. Apache 2.0.
• Hermes 4 (NousResearch) — Feb 2026. Self-improving agentic model with closed-loop learning. Curates own memory and builds skills from experience. Apache 2.0.
• Snowflake Arctic — Apr 2024. Enterprise MoE model balancing high-quality performance with efficient training costs. Optimized for complex data operations. Apache 2.0.
• Falcon 3 (TII) — Dec 2024. Compact high-performance model with strong reasoning. Designed for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. TII Falcon-LLM License 2.0.
• Apple OpenELM — Apr 2024. Family of efficient on-device SLMs using layer-wise attention scaling. Runs locally on Apple Silicon with full privacy. Apple Sample Code License.
• DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 — Jul 2026. 304B efficiency-focused variant. 1M context. MIT license. Fully self-hostable with GGUF support.
• Gemma 4 (12B) — May 2026. Apache 2.0. Google's first laptop-class multimodal open-weight model. 256K context, native text/image/audio/video understanding.
• Llama 4 Scout — May 2026. 109B MoE, 10M context. Native multimodal. Apache 2.0.
• Kimi K3 — Jul 2026. 2.8T-parameter MoE (896 experts, ~50B active). World's largest open-weight model. 1M context, native vision + video. Modified MIT. Weights released Jul 27.
• Ternary Bonsai 2 27B (PrismML) — Sep 2026. 27B reasoning model derived from Qwen3.8-27B. Ternary compression shrinks weights to ~8.5 GB while retaining ~98% of the base model's benchmark scores. Coding, math, tool calling, image understanding. 262K context. Runs on consumer hardware.
• DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — Sep 2026. First model on DeepSeek's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture. 552B MoE (8B active on input / 16B on output). Native image understanding, compressed KV cache (~1/4 of prior Flash) for agentic workloads. 1M context.
• GLM-5.3-FlashX (Z.ai) — Sep 2026. High-speed variant of GLM-5.3-Flash (320B total / 18B active, hybrid sparse + linear attention). Native multimodal, up to 200 tokens/s. Suited for coding, visual understanding, and long-horizon agent tasks. 1M context.
• Ling 3.0 Flash VL (inclusionAI) — Sep 2026. 124B MoE (5.5B active). Builds on Ling 3.0 Flash with native visual perception and visual-agent capabilities. Hybrid instant/reasoning model with tool calling. 262K context. A free variant is available on OpenRouter.

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🔌 Free API Providers

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Providers offering free tiers to access models via API — no local hardware required.

• Google AI Studio — ~15 free models — Most generous free tier. Rate-limited free access to Gemini 3.x Flash / Flash-Lite models (Gemini 2.0 Flash was shut down Jun 1, 2026). Generous limits for prototyping, no credit card required.

• OpenRouter — ~21 free models — Aggregates 450+ models. Filter by "Free" to see models available at no cost. Note: free models require a positive credit balance (balance may be $0). Includes experimental and subsidized open-weight models. Note: the free lineup churns constantly — treat this as a snapshot.

• AnyAPI — 15 free models — 400+ models with OpenAI-compatible API. Free tier: 100K tokens/day, unlimited users. Includes free and basic models. No credit card required.

• Groq — 12 free models — Ultra-fast LPU inference. Free tier includes Llama 3.x/4, Qwen, GPT-OSS, and Whisper models with generous daily rate limits (no credit card).

• Hugging Face Inference Providers — Free tier is only $0.10/month for free accounts ($2.00/month for PRO/Team) — Free access to thousands of community models. Effectively unusable at that allowance; pay-as-you-go for anything real.

• NVIDIA NIM — 100+ free models — Free, rate-limited API access to accelerated versions of Llama, Mistral, Gemma, and more on NVIDIA infrastructure.

• DeepInfra — ⚠️ No free tier. Their pricing page states you must add a card or pre-pay before you can use the service. Serverless inference for popular open-source models.

• Together AI — ⚠️ Mostly paid, but at least one model is genuinely $0: Ternary Bonsai 27B is listed at $0.00 input / $0.00 output. Everything else is per-token, and a minimum credit purchase is typically required. Fast inference on many open-source models.

• Fireworks AI — ⚠️ No free models; ~$1 signup credit only. Optimized for low latency on open-source models.

• SiliconFlow — 15+ free models — Chinese platform with a large free tier: Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-MT-7B, BGE-M3, bge-reranker-v2-m3, and others listed at ¥0. No credit card required.

• Cloudflare Workers AI — 50+ free models — Free tier for running select open-source models at the edge.

• Black Forest Labs — 2 free models — Free Flux 2 Dev and Flux Kontext Dev image generation via API. Rate-limited, no credit card required.

• Replicate — Limited free runs on select "Try for Free" models, no credit card required; then prepaid pay-as-you-go.

• Poe (Quora) — ⚠️ Free tier changed over time; link check returned HTTP 403 (may block automation). Previously reported reduction (~300 compute points/day); verify in your browser before relying on exact numbers.

• Qwen Studio (Alibaba) — Free access to Qwen 3.6-Plus, Qwen 3.6-Max, and other Qwen models via web chat and API. 1M token context for agentic coding.

• Ollama Cloud — Free cloud plan with starter models, starter usage credits, and 1 concurrent model; limits reset periodically. Exact limits require manual confirmation. Same ollama run command as local.

• Mistral AI (La Plateforme) — 12 free models — Free API tier with access to Mistral Large, Mistral Nemo, Codestral and more. 1 req/s, 500k tokens/min. Requires phone verification and data usage opt-in.

• Cohere — 15 free models — Free evaluation API key for Command R, Command R+, Embed, and Rerank models. 20 req/min, 1,000 req/month.

• DeepSeek Platform — Free API credits for new users (5M tokens). Access to DeepSeek V4, DeepSeek-R1, and other models. Generous free allocation.

• Hyperbolic — Open-access AI cloud with affordable inference. Pay-as-you-go GPU compute (payment method required). Note: free trial credits for new accounts are no longer prominently advertised (Sep 2026); verify in-account before relying on a free tier. Supports Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and other open models.

• Novita AI — Free credits for testing 100+ models including Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral. OpenAI-compatible API with competitive pricing beyond the free tier.

• Anakin.ai — 30 daily free credits for accessing multiple AI models. Web chat interface and API access. Supports GPT-4, Claude, and open-weight models.

• Nebius AI — Note: Free trial suspended July 13, 2026. Now steers new users to a ~$1 trial credit via Nebius Token Factory (formerly AI Studio), with a $25 minimum deposit for paid usage. Fast inference on NVIDIA H100 infrastructure.

• Fal.ai — Fast, serverless platform supporting Llama, Flux, and Stable Diffusion models. Note: free starter credits are not prominently advertised (Sep 2026); verify whether new accounts still receive credits. Pay-as-you-go beyond any free tier.

• Vercel AI Gateway — $5/month free credits for the AI Gateway. Proxy and cache requests across multiple LLM providers. SDK is open-source and free.

• AI21 Labs — ⚠️ $10 trial credits, valid for 7 days (not 3 months). Access to Jamba 1.5, Jamba 1.6, and other AI21 models. No credit card required to start.

• Amazon Bedrock — $200 AWS credits for new customers. Access to Llama, Mistral, Claude, Titan, and other foundation models via API.

• Microsoft Foundry (Azure) — $200 free trial credits (30 days). Access GPT-4o, Llama, Mistral, Phi, and other models via Azure's unified AI platform.

• RunPod — Free credits for serverless GPU inference. Deploy open-weight models as serverless endpoints. Supports Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and more.

• Cerebras — ⚠️ Old "free tier" replaced (Jul 2026). Now $5 free trial credits that expire in 30 days after adding a verified payment method; no longer a permanent free tier. Ultra-fast inference on Llama, Gemma, and gpt-oss models. Note: Model availability fluctuates.

• BazaarLink — Free OpenAI-compatible API with auto:free routing to zero-cost models. No credit card, no trial expiry. 10 RPM, 130 req/day.

• Kimi API (Moonshot) — ⚠️ Free tier no longer shown on the platform (Sep 2026). New-account free tier and Kimi K2.5 (128K) are gone from the site; catalog is now K3 / K2.7 Code / K2.6 with per-token pricing. Verify in your browser before relying on free access. OpenAI-compatible. Note: rebranded from platform.moonshot.cn.

• Alibaba DashScope — Rebranded: DashScope → Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (Bailian). Free tier for new users (100M+ free tokens) on Qwen models via OpenAI-compatible API. (dashscope.aliyun.com now redirects to Bailian.)

• SambaNova Cloud — ⚠️ Free plan tightened (Sep 2026). Still "no credit card required to start," but the free plan now says you must add a payment method and purchase credits to run your first requests; no automatic $5/30-day credits anymore. Fast RDU inference for Llama 3.1 405B, Llama 3.3 70B, DeepSeek V3.1/V3.2, Qwen 2.5, gpt-oss-120b.

• OVHcloud AI Endpoints — 14 free models — EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant free tier. No registration required for anonymous tier. Models: Qwen, Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek, gpt-oss-120B, embeddings, image generation. 12 RPM. OpenAI-compatible.

• Chutes.ai — ⚠️ Free tier ended — now paid only. Was 2 free models for community-powered GPU inference. No longer free.

• ModelScope — 55 free models — Chinese platform with 50+ free open models. Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, and more. No credit card required.

• Z.ai (Zhipu AI) — 4 free models — Free tier for GLM models including GLM-4.5, GLM-4V. No credit card required.

• LongCat AI — Free API for LongCat open-weight models. One-time 10M token grant after signup + KYC. Free cached tokens. OpenAI-compatible. MIT license.

• Coze (ByteDance) — ⚠️ Rebranded (Sep 2026). Now positioned as an "AI Agent Intelligent Office Platform" (writing, PPT, web dev, design). The old "free bot-building platform with API access to GPT-4o/Gemini 1.5 Pro" pitch no longer matches the site; verify whether the bot-builder API free tier still exists.

• Free.ai — 400+ AI tools via a single OpenAI-compatible API. Free tier: 30,000 free tokens/day on self-hosted models plus 1,000 requests/month (60 RPM), no credit card required. Chat, image, video, music, voice, OCR, translation.

• Requesty — Free AI API with 200 requests/day. Works with Claude Code, Cline, Cursor. No credit card. OpenAI-compatible.

• AINative Studio — ⚠️ Free tier ended (was 10M tokens/month). Now a $5/mo Hobbyist plan with a 3-day trial only. 84+ models (Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen).

• CloudCode.ONE — ⚠️ No free tier — credit-based ($2 to start). OpenAI and Anthropic-compatible API for coding agents. Powered by GLM-4.7-Flash.

• ZeroLimitAI — ⚠️ Free tier is only a 3-day trial; permanent access is a one-time $99 "Lifetime" purchase. OpenAI-compatible (model: "auto" auto-routes to the best free model). No subscriptions. 30-day money-back guarantee. Site intermittently returns HTTP 402 — retry if you hit it.

• FreeAIapikey — 100K free tokens daily — OpenAI-compatible gateway with GPT-5.5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 4.7/4.8/5/5.5, and Sonnet 5. No credit card, 9 models. $2 free credit on signup.- Chat Oripe — ⚠️ Currently unreachable (HTTP 530). Previously offered free tokens via OpenAI-compatible API; service appears unavailable.

• FreeTheAi — Open-source Discord signup/free OpenAI-compatible API with 50+ models. No credit card. Small/community-run project (~20★, 1 fork); last commit Aug 2026 — treat as best-effort.

• OpenCode Zen — 9 free models — Curated AI gateway with free general and coding models (DeepSeek V4 Flash Free, MiMo-V2.5 Free, Nemotron 3 Ultra Free, Big Pickle, Qwen 3.6 Plus Free, MiniMax M3 Free, North Mini Code Free, and more). OpenAI-compatible API. No credit card required. Note: docs mark the free models as limited-time; Zen also offers a $20 prepaid balance option.

• LLM7.io — 15 free models, no credit card required. DeepSeek R1/V3, GPT-4o mini and more. 1M context, multimodal. 30 RPM free (120 RPM with optional token).

• Kilo Code — 12 free models, no credit card. Nemotron 3 Ultra, Step 3.7 Flash, and more. 1M context, ~200 req/hr. Free tier for coding agents. Note: acquired by Anaconda (banner on site); free "Auto Free" tier still advertised.

• Aion Labs — 7 free models, registration only. Includes Aion 2.5. 128K context, 15 RPM. No credit card required.

• Agnes AI — 5 free models — Free tier with Agnes 1.5/2.0 Flash and image models. 256K context, 30 RPM. Registration only, no credit card.

• Glhf.chat — ⚠️ Currently unreachable (HTTP 522). Previously offered a free OpenAI-compatible API; service appears unavailable.

• Nscale — 2 free models — Free tier (registration only) with Llama 3.3 70B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-70B. 128K context. OpenAI-compatible.

• OrcaRouter — 4 free models — DeepSeek V4 Pro, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen3.8 27B, and Tencent Hy3 at $0 per token, plus an orcarouter/free alias that auto-routes across the free lineup. OpenAI-, Anthropic-, and Gemini-compatible endpoints. No credit card and no trial expiry. The same page also gives away free vouchers for frontier models — e.g. $10 (~5M tokens) on Grok 4.5 — plus student programs and partner-hackathon credit, browsable without an account; each card shows its own terms and flags any card requirement.

• TypeSafe (Jev) — Structured decision models (System One family) that return a typed choice instead of free-form text, for routing and classification inside applications. Free output tokens on OpenRouter (typesafe/jev-latest); 32K context.

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🖼️ Image & Video Generation

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-weight image and video generation models — run locally or via free APIs.

• FLUX.2-dev (Black Forest Labs) — 2.6K★. 32B rectified flow transformer. SOTA open T2I, single/multi-reference editing, in/out-painting. Updated VAE. FLUX.1-dev Non-Commercial License.
• ERNIE-Image / ERNIE-Image-Turbo (Baidu) — 0.5K★. 8B DiT SOTA among open-weight models. Strong text rendering, layout control. Turbo: 8-step generation. Apache 2.0.
• Z-Image (Tongyi Lab / Alibaba) — 12.1K★. Open-weight T2I with strong GenEval scores. Z-Image-Turbo for 4-step generation. Apache 2.0.
• Pollinations.ai — Free image generation API. No API key or signup needed. Text-to-image, image-to-image. OpenAI-compatible. Integrates with ComfyUI.
• Kavel — Free image generation API. No API key or signup: send a prompt with any client id and poll for the image. Free output is 1K with a watermark and a small daily allowance per IP; an API key lifts it and adds image editing. SDKs for Python, JS, Go, Rust and more. GitHub
• OpenImageGen (Hugging Face) — Free, open-source image generation playground. Supports multiple community models via diffusers. Apache 2.0. Note: login/auth may be required (HTTP 401 at check time).
• FLUX Video Edit (Black Forest Labs) — Sep 2026. Prompt-based video editing: add, remove, or replace objects/characters, rebuild the setting, edit on-screen text, change colors/materials, translate dialogue with lip sync. Preserves source duration, aspect ratio, and audio. Source clips up to 15s / 50 MiB. Available via OpenRouter (paid per second).
• ComfyUI — 135K★. Node-based image and video generation UI. Run FLUX, Stable Diffusion, and more locally. GPL-3.0.

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🔀 Free API Routers

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Open-source tools that route requests across multiple AI providers — unified API, automatic failover, and cost optimization.

• 9Router — Open-source gateway connecting 40+ providers with RTK token compression (2-4x reduction). One API key for all services. Free-tier routing to Kiro AI (~50 credits/mo: Claude 4.5 + GLM-5 + MiniMax), OpenCode Free (no auth), and Vertex AI ($300 credits). Smart 3-tier fallback (Subscription → Cheap → Free). MIT license. GitHub

• OmniRoute — Full-stack AI gateway with 250+ providers, 90+ free. TypeScript, runs on Web/Desktop/Android. Prompt compression, 3-level proxy for geo restrictions. GitHub

• LiteLLM — Python-based proxy unifying 100+ LLMs behind a single API. Spend tracking, virtual keys, production-ready. MIT license. GitHub

• Portkey AI Gateway — Production guardrails and routing for AI apps. Hybrid open-source (community) and managed (enterprise) tiers. GitHub

• FreeAIapikey — 100K free tokens daily — OpenAI-compatible gateway with GPT-5.5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 4.7/4.8/5/5.5, and Sonnet 5. No credit card, 9 models. $2 free credit on signup.

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💻 Local Inference Tools

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Run models on your own machine — no API keys needed, full privacy.

• Ollama — The easiest way to run local LLMs. One command to download and run any model. macOS, Linux, Windows. GitHub
• LM Studio — Polished desktop GUI. Browse, download, and chat with models. Built-in model browser and local API server.
• llama.cpp — High-performance C++ inference engine. Runs on CPU and GPU. Supports GGUF quantization. Powers most other local tools.
• Jan — Open-source ChatGPT alternative for desktop. Built-in model downloader, local API server. GitHub
• GPT4All — ⚠️ Unmaintained — last commit May 2025 (last release Feb 2025). Privacy-focused local chatbot. Runs on consumer hardware. Built-in model browser. GitHub
• text-generation-webui (Oobabooga) — Feature-rich web UI. Supports multiple backends (Transformers, llama.cpp, ExLlama, AutoGPTQ).
• LocalAI — Drop-in OpenAI API replacement. Run models locally with an OpenAI-compatible API. GitHub
• KoboldCPP — Single-file executable for running GGUF models. Focused on story generation but general-purpose.
• llamafile (Mozilla) — Distributable single-file executables that run LLMs. No installation needed.
• vLLM — High-throughput production inference engine. Uses PagedAttention for efficient serving.
• SGLang — Fast inference framework with structured generation and RadixAttention.
• TensorRT-LLM (NVIDIA) — NVIDIA's optimized inference engine. Best performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
• ExLlamaV3 — Optimized inference for Llama-family models. Successor to ExLlamaV2. Fastest option for single-GPU inference.
• Aphrodite Engine — High-performance LLM serving engine with advanced quantization support.
• TabbyAPI — Lightweight, fast OpenAI-compatible API server for ExLlama. (Originally ExLlamaV2; now targets ExLlama/ExLlamaV3.)
• LlamaEdge — Lightweight inference framework for edge devices. OpenAI-compatible API for open-source models. Runs on WasmEdge for portability. GitHub
• MLC LLM — Universal deployment engine by UW/SJTU. Runs LLMs on any hardware — laptops, phones, browsers. OpenAI-compatible API.
• WebLLM — In-browser LLM inference via WebGPU. Runs models directly in your browser with zero setup. No server needed.
• FastChat (LMSYS) — Open platform for training, serving, and evaluating LLMs. Provides OpenAI-compatible API and web UI for local models.
• Hugging Face TGI — 10.9K★. Production-grade serving toolkit for large language models. Note: Archived by Hugging Face (Mar 2026). Consider vLLM, SGLang, or TGI forks for active development.
• DeepSpeed (Microsoft) — Deep learning optimization library with inference acceleration. Enables running larger models on limited hardware through ZeRO optimization.
• AirLLM — Run large models (70B+) on consumer hardware with limited memory. Loads models layer-by-layer for extreme memory efficiency. Actively maintained (last push Aug 2026).
• Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code — VS Code extension to browse, test, fine-tune, and deploy models locally. Integrates ONNX and llama.cpp.
• Ollama Grid Search — Desktop utility for systematic model evaluation. Test multiple models, prompts, and inference parameters side-by-side via a Rust/React GUI.
• oMLX — 22.3K★. LLM inference server for Apple Silicon with continuous batching, tiered KV caching (hot RAM + cold SSD), and macOS menu bar app. OpenAI and Anthropic compatible. Apache 2.0.
• MTPLX — 2.5K★. Native MTP speculative decoding on Apple Silicon — ~2x faster decode with no external drafter. Mac app + CLI, OpenAI/Anthropic compatible server. Auto-tunes draft depth per machine. Apache 2.0.

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💬 AI Chatbot UIs

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-source web interfaces for chatting with AI models — self-host or use hosted versions.

• Open WebUI — Feature-rich ChatGPT-like interface for Ollama and OpenAI-compatible backends. RAG, image generation, multi-user. GitHub
• LibreChat — Open-source ChatGPT clone supporting 40+ providers, multi-user, plugins, and RAG. Note: company acquired by ClickHouse; repo actively maintained (last commit Sep 2026). Repo has moved to the LibreChat-AI org — the old danny-avila link redirects. GitHub
• AnythingLLM — All-in-one desktop app for chatting with documents and models. Built-in RAG pipeline. GitHub
• Big-AGI — Feature-rich AI chat with personas, multi-model support, voice, and code execution. GitHub
• Lobe Chat — Multi-agent orchestration platform with plugin system and multi-provider support. GitHub
• Mistral Le Chat — Web UI for Mistral Large 3, Medium 3.5, and Codestral; multimodal input (images, code). Free tier with rate‑limited calls (≈2 RPM, 500 K tokens / month). No credit‑card required. (HTTP 403 at check time; may block automation).
• Google AI Studio Chat — Direct chat interface for Gemini 3.5 Flash & Gemini 2.5 Pro; multimodal (image + text) and code‑execution blocks. Same free limits as AI Studio API (15 RPM, 1 500 tokens / day).
• OpenCode (GitHub‑hosted) — IDE‑style coding assistant that can be pointed at any free API (Groq, Google AI Studio, OpenRouter). Free backend integration; supports file editing, terminal commands, multi‑turn conversations. ⚠️ Repo archived (read-only, last commit Sep 18, 2025); the active project now lives at opencode.ai.

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🎵 Audio & Speech Models

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-weight text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT), and voice generation models you can run locally.

• Qwen3-TTS (Alibaba) — 13.6K★. Voice cloning, voice design, 10 languages. Streaming support with 97ms TTFB. 0.6B/1.7B. Apache 2.0.
• Chatterbox (Resemble AI) — 26.6K★. SOTA open-source TTS. Multilingual V3 (23+ languages, 0.5B). Turbo: 350M for low-latency agents. Paralinguistic tags. MIT.
• MOSS-TTS Family (MOSI.AI/OpenMOSS) — 4.1K★. 8B flagship + 100M Nano (CPU). Voice cloning, dialogue generation, sound effects, realtime streaming. Apache 2.0.
• Orpheus-TTS (Canopy Labs) — 6.3K★. Llama-3b backbone, human-like speech, zero-shot voice cloning, emotion tags. ~200ms streaming latency. Apache 2.0.
• NeuTTS (Neuphonic) — 6.3K★. On-device TTS with instant voice cloning. GGUF quantized for CPU/mobile. 120M Nano and 360M Air variants. Apache 2.0.
• Faster-Whisper — 25.6K★. CTranslate2-based Whisper for 4x faster transcription. MIT.
• Muse Voice Transcribe 1.0 (Meta) — Sep 2026. Synchronous speech-to-text for push-to-talk, endpointing, and speaker-aware transcription. Keyword biasing for domain terms and language-name hints. Accepts mono 16-bit PCM WAV (16/24 kHz, up to 10 min). Available via OpenRouter.

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🤖 AI Coding Assistants

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free tools that integrate AI into your development workflow.

• Continue.dev — ⚠️ Acquired by Cursor (Jun 2026); standalone product & cloud were shut down (data deleted Jul 15, 2026). OSS repo handed to the community under Apache 2.0 (last commit Jul 21, 2026). Open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains. GitHub
• Aider — AI pair programming in the terminal. Edits code in your local git repo. Supports GPT, Claude, and local models. GitHub
• Gemini CLI (Google) — Jul 2026. Open-source terminal agent with generous free Gemini quota. Supports agentic coding workflows.
• Kilo Code — 2026. VS Code/JetBrains agentic coding extension with model-agnostic support and Plan/Act oversight. Note: acquired by Anaconda (2026); repo remains active.
• Tabby — Self-hosted AI coding assistant with no dependency on external services. GitHub
• Cody (Sourcegraph) — ⚠️ Standalone Cody free tier discontinued (Jul 2025); sourcegraph.com/cody now redirects to docs and Sourcegraph is enterprise-only. No longer a free tier for individuals.
• Llama Coder (Nutlope) — Free AI code generation tool. Generate entire apps from prompts.
• Bolt.new (StackBlitz) — Free tier for AI-powered full-stack web app development in browser.
• Claude Code (Anthropic) — Terminal-based AI coding assistant. Most features require a Claude subscription or API credits. Limited free usage via terminal CLI.
• Cursor 3 — Apr 2026. AI-native code editor with deep model integration and agentic features. Free tier available.
• CodeBuff — CLI-based AI coding assistant that understands entire codebases. Multi-agent architecture, works with any model provider through natural language instructions.
• Pi — Open-source terminal AI coding agent with a unified multi-provider API. Model-agnostic, supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Extensible plugin architecture. GitHub
• Cline — Popular autonomous VS Code agent. Creates/edits files, runs terminal commands, browses web. Open-source, BYOK (bring your own API key). GitHub
• OpenHands — Autonomous AI software engineer. Navigates file systems, runs shell commands, tests code in browser. Self-hostable. GitHub
• Goose — Open-source CLI agent for complex software engineering tasks. Extensible plugin system. Built by Block/Square. GitHub
• Qwen Code — 2025. Open-source terminal AI coding agent with 28.2K stars. Multi-protocol (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Qwen). Auto-memory, sub-agents, agent teams, MCP. Apache 2.0.
• CodeWhale — 2026. Terminal coding agent with 41K+ stars. 30+ providers, local models via Ollama/vLLM. TUI, headless mode, web UI. MIT license.
• nanobot (HKUDS) — 2026. Open-source, ultra-lightweight personal AI agent with WebUI, chat channels, MCP, memory, and scheduling. 48.6K★. MIT.
• MiMoCode (Xiaomi) — Jun 2026. Terminal-native coding agent with persistent memory, subagent orchestration, and goal-driven autonomous loops. 13.5K★. MIT.

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📝 Code Models

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Specialized for code generation, completion, and analysis.

• MAI-Code-1-Flash (Microsoft) — Jun 2026. Microsoft's open-weight coding model for lowering infrastructure costs.
• DeepSeek Coder — State-of-the-art open-weight code generation. DeepSeek's coder series leads SWE-bench. MIT license.
• Qwen2.5-Coder (Alibaba) — Highly capable code model series (1.5B–32B). Excellent balance of speed and quality. Apache 2.0.
• Codestral (Mistral) — Mistral's dedicated code generation model — fill-in-the-middle, completion, and instruction.
• CodeGemma (Google) — Google's Gemma architecture fine-tuned for code completion and instruction. Apache 2.0.
• StarCoder2 (BigCode) — Transparently trained code model covering 619 languages. OpenRAIL-M license.
• Yi-Coder (01.AI) — Efficient coding model with strong long-context understanding. Yi License (Apache 2.0 compatible).
• Granite Code (IBM) — IBM's enterprise-grade code model, available in multiple sizes. Apache 2.0.
• Phi-4-mini (Microsoft) — Lightweight model optimized for reasoning and code. Punches above its weight class. MIT license.
• Qwen3-Coder-Next (Alibaba) — Early 2026. Latest generation of Qwen's code series. Strong reasoning and long-context coding capabilities. Apache 2.0.
• CodeLlama (Meta) — Aug 2023. Llama 2-based code generation pioneer. Supports infilling, completion, and instruction. Llama 2 Community License.
• WizardCoder (WizardLM) — 2023. Evol-Instruct fine-tuned for complex coding tasks. Strong general code generation performance. Apache 2.0.
• OpenCodeInterpreter — 2024. Integrates execution feedback to iteratively improve generated code. Bridges generation and execution. Apache 2.0.
• Stable Code 3B (Stability AI) — Aug 2023. Lightweight 3B code model optimized for fill-in-the-middle. Efficient for local autocompletion. StabilityAI license.
• CodeGeeX2 (THUDM) — 2023. Multilingual code model supporting 20+ languages. Strong in both Chinese and English code tasks. Apache 2.0.
• CodeT5+ (Salesforce) — 2023. Encoder-decoder architecture unifying code generation, completion, and understanding. BSD-3 license.
• SantaCoder (BigCode) — 2023. Light 1.1B model specialized for Python, Java, and JavaScript. Fast and efficient for IDE integration.

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🧬 Embedding Models

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-weight embedding and reranker models for semantic search, RAG, and text representation.

• Qwen3-Embedding (Alibaba) — 2K★. #1 on MTEB multilingual leaderboard. Sizes: 0.6B/4B/8B. 32K context, MRL support, instruction-aware. Includes reranker models. Apache 2.0.
• BGE-M3 (BAAI) — Multi-lingual (100+ languages), multi-functionality (dense, sparse, colbert), multi-granularity (8K tokens). MIT.
• FlagEmbedding (BAAI) — 12.2K★. Framework and model zoo: BGE series, BGE-VL (multimodal), bge-en-icl, bge-multilingual-gemma2 (9B multilingual SOTA). MIT.
• nomic-embed-text-v2 (Nomic AI) — 1.5B MoE embedding model. 8192 context. Matches or exceeds OpenAI text-embedding-3-small. Apache 2.0.
• mxbai-embed-large-v1 — 0.3B lightweight embedding. Top of MTEB among sub-0.5B models. Apache 2.0.
• Google text-embedding-004 — 1,500 req/day via AI Studio. 512-dim & 768-dim variants. Free, no credit card required. Best for RAG and semantic search.
• Cohere Embed 4 — 1M free tokens/month (≈200K embeddings/day). 1024-dim multilingual (100+ languages). Apache 2.0. (Link fixed from cohere.com/embedding, which now returns 404.)

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🔍 RAG & Vector Databases

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free tools for building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines — vector storage, embedding search, and document retrieval.

• Chroma — AI-native open-source embedding database. Runs in-process, no GPU needed. GitHub
• Qdrant — High-performance vector search engine. Free tier on Qdrant Cloud or self-host via Docker. GitHub
• pgvector — Vector similarity search inside PostgreSQL. Free if you already run Postgres.
• LanceDB — Developer-friendly vector database built on Lance columnar format. Runs locally, no server needed. GitHub
• Weaviate — Open-source vector database. Free sandbox tier on Weaviate Cloud. GitHub
• Milvus (Zilliz) — Cloud-native vector database. Free tier on Zilliz Cloud or self-host. GitHub
• txtai — AI-powered semantic search and RAG in a single Python package. GitHub
• R2R (SciPhi) — Production-ready RAG engine with API, user management, and observability. Note: Largely dormant — last release Jun 2025, last commit Nov 2025. Consider Dify or LangGraph instead.
• Docling (IBM) — Document understanding and conversion for RAG pipelines. Extracts PDFs, images, and more. GitHub
• Unstructured.io — Preprocessing toolkit for documents (PDF, HTML, Word) for RAG pipelines. Free tier available.
• GraphRAG (Microsoft) — Modular graph-based RAG pipeline. Extracts a knowledge graph from unstructured text via LLM prompting, then answers over it with community-summarization for better global/abstractive queries than vector-only RAG. MIT license. GitHub

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🧩 Agentic Frameworks

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-source frameworks for building AI agents and multi-agent systems.

• LangGraph (LangChain) — Low-level framework for building stateful, multi-agent applications. GitHub
• CrewAI — Multi-agent framework for orchestrating specialized AI agents to work together. GitHub
• AutoGen (Microsoft) — Extensible framework for building multi-agent conversations. Note: In maintenance mode — last commit Apr 6, 2026, last release Mar 2026. Microsoft steers new users to Microsoft Agent Framework. GitHub
• Agno (formerly Phidata) — Full-stack AI framework for building multimodal agents with memory, knowledge, and tools. GitHub
• PydanticAI — Agent framework by Pydantic with type-safe outputs and dependency injection. GitHub
• Mastra — TypeScript framework for building AI applications and agent workflows. GitHub
• OpenAI Agents SDK — Lightweight SDK for building single and multi-agent systems. GitHub
• Semantic Kernel (Microsoft) — SDK for orchestrating AI agents with planners, memory, and connectors. GitHub
• Dify — LLM app development platform with visual workflow builder and agent capabilities. GitHub
• Flowise — Low-code visual LLM flow builder with drag-and-drop interface. Note: Acquired by Workday; repo archived (read-only) Aug 13, 2026. GitHub
• Fazm — Apr 2026. Open-source local computer-use agent for macOS. Drives apps via accessibility APIs, model-agnostic, faster than screenshot-based agents. Small project (~339★, last commit Sep 2026).
• Smolagents (Hugging Face) — Minimalist agent library where agents "think in code." Lightweight, zero boilerplate. Supports code agents and tool-calling agents.
• Swarms — Enterprise-grade multi-agent orchestration framework. Scalable infrastructure for autonomous agent swarms. Highly modular. Actively maintained (last commit Sep 2026).
• Letta (MemGPT) — Framework for long-term agent memory. Virtual memory management that pages data in/out of context like an OS. Persistent agents.
• Griptape — Enterprise agent framework with strictly typed Pipelines, Workflows, and Agents. Structure-first, production-ready.
• Atomic Agents — Framework inspired by Atomic Design. Compose agents from small, reusable, modular components. Testable and scalable.
• PraisonAI — Low-code multi-agent framework. Define agent roles, tasks, and flows via YAML configuration. Wraps underlying agent frameworks.
• Cognee — GraphRAG framework for agent knowledge management. Builds interconnected knowledge graphs from unstructured data.
• MetaGPT — Multi-agent framework simulating a full software team. Assigns Agent, Product Manager, Engineer roles. Implements SOPs for end-to-end code generation. Note: Slowed development — last commit Jan 21, 2026, last release Apr 2024.
• ChatDev (OpenBMB) — Virtual software company driven by multi-agent collaboration. Follows waterfall model through design, coding, testing, and documentation.
• AutoGPT — The original autonomous agent experiment. Sets its own goals, iterates on tasks, and executes without continuous human input. Web browsing and file management.
• Bee Agent Framework (IBM) — Production-ready framework for building reliable AI agents in Python and TypeScript. Modular, with built-in observability and IBM research optimizations.
• Eliza (elizaOS) — Multi-platform agent framework for creating character-driven AI agents. Handles social media interaction, complex decision-making, and autonomous behavior across platforms.
• Qwen-Agent (Alibaba) — Agent framework tightly integrated with the Qwen model family. Optimized for function calling, code execution, RAG, and tool use with Qwen models.
• AGiXT — Extensible modular AI agent automation platform. Plugin system for swapping LLMs, memory backends, and tools. Highly customizable agent workflows.
• Microsoft Agent Framework — 13.8K★. Production-grade multi-agent framework for Python and .NET. Graph-based workflows, streaming, human-in-the-loop. MIT.
• GenericAgent — 14.3K★. Minimal, self-evolving autonomous agent framework. ~3K lines core, 9 atomic tools. Self-crystallizing skill tree from every task. MIT.
• Omnigent — 10.3K★. Open-source meta-harness orchestrating Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Pi, and custom agents. Real-time collaboration from any device. Apache 2.0.

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🔧 MCP Servers & Tools

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI assistants to external tools, data sources, and APIs.

• GitHub MCP Server — 33.2K★. Official GitHub MCP server by GitHub. Repository management, issue/PR automation, CI/CD intelligence, code analysis. OAuth or PAT auth. MIT license.
• GitMCP — 8.4K★. Free, open-source, remote MCP server for any GitHub project. Zero-setup documentation and code access for AI assistants. Apache 2.0. Note: quiet since May 2026.
• MCP Reference Servers (Anthropic) — 90.6K★. Official reference implementations: Filesystem, Git, Fetch, Memory, Time, Sequential Thinking. Apache 2.0 / MIT.

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🎛 Fine-tuning Tools

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Tools to fine-tune free models on your own data — all free and open-source.

• Unsloth — Fast memory-efficient fine-tuning. 2x faster, 50% less memory. Supports QLoRA, LoRA, full fine-tune.
• Axolotl — Streamlined fine-tuning framework supporting multiple model architectures and quantization methods.
• LLaMA-Factory — Easy-to-use fine-tuning with web UI. Supports 100+ models, multiple training methods.
• Hugging Face TRL — Transformer Reinforcement Learning library. SFT, PPO, DPOTrainer, GRPOTrainer for aligning models.
• XTuner (InternLM) — Efficient fine-tuning toolkit supporting QLoRA, LoRA, and full fine-tune with multiple model architectures.
• Ludwig (Predibase) — Declarative ML framework. Fine-tune models with a simple config file. GitHub

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✨ Prompt Engineering Tools

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free tools for testing, managing, and optimizing prompts.

• Promptfoo — Company acquired by OpenAI; repo actively maintained (last push Aug 2026). Open-source tool for prompt testing and evaluation. Systematic A/B testing of prompts. GitHub
• Fabric (Daniel Miessler) — Open-source framework for augmenting humans with AI. Library of curated prompts (patterns) for common tasks.
• LangFuse — Open-source LLM engineering platform with prompt management, versioning, and evaluation. GitHub
• DSPy (Stanford) — Framework for algorithmically optimizing LM prompts and weights. GitHub
• Agenta — Open-source LLM platform for prompt management, evaluation, and deployment. GitHub

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📊 LLM Evaluation & Observability

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open-source tools for tracing, evaluating, and monitoring LLM applications in development and production.

• Langfuse — 35.1K★. Full LLM engineering platform: tracing, evaluations, prompt management, playground, datasets. Self-hostable. MIT (core). GitHub
• Opik (Comet) — 22.3K★. Open-source LLM observability, evaluation, and agent tracing. Datasets, experiments, LLM-as-judge, guardrails, prompt management. Apache 2.0.
• Phoenix (Arize AI) — 11.6K★. AI observability platform with OpenTelemetry-based tracing, evals, experiments, and prompt playground. Elastic License 2.0.
• TruLens — 3.6K★. Agent-specific evaluations (7 purpose-built evaluators). OpenTelemetry tracing, MCP support, batch and inline evaluation. MIT. Note: org renamed TruEra → truera; old URLs still redirect.
• OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) — 7.5K★. OpenTelemetry-based LLM observability. Send traces to any OTLP-compatible backend. Apache 2.0.

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📊 Datasets

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free, open datasets for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating models.

• Hugging Face Datasets — The standard hub for open datasets. 150,000+ datasets across all tasks.
• Common Corpus — Massive open-source dataset for training large language models. (May require Hugging Face login; HTTP 401 at check time).
• The Stack v2 (BigCode) — Large-scale code dataset covering 619 programming languages. Permissive license.
• FineWeb (Hugging Face) — High-quality web dataset for LLM pre-training. 15T tokens.
• Dolly (Databricks) — 15k instruction-response pairs for fine-tuning. CC-BY-SA.
• OpenAssistant Conversations — 160k human-generated assistant conversations. Apache 2.0.
• ShareGPT (RyokoAI) — Real user-ChatGPT conversations for fine-tuning.
• UltraChat (Sean C.) — 200k multi-turn conversations synthesized by ChatGPT.
• No Robots (Hugging Face) — 10k high-quality human-written instructions. Apache 2.0.
• MMLU / GSM8K — Standard benchmarks for evaluation.
• CodeAlchemy (IBM) — Jul 2026. ~1T tokens of synthetic code across 15 languages. Includes 1.3M code+execution-trace pairs. Permissive license.

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☁ Model Hosting Platforms

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free platforms that host models — run inference without downloading anything.

• Hugging Face Spaces — Free hosting for ML apps (Gradio, Streamlit). Thousands of community demos.
• Hugging Face Inference Endpoints (Free Tier) — Deploy models with free trial credits.
• Google Colab (Free Tier) — Free GPU (T4, sometimes A100). Perfect for running models and fine-tuning.
• Kaggle Notebooks — Free GPU (T4 x2). 30 hours/week. Good for heavier workloads.
• Lightning AI Studio — Free tier with GPU access for development and prototyping.
• Modal — Free monthly credits for serverless GPU compute.
• Replicate (Free Tier) — Free credits for running community models.
• Deepnote — Free tier is CPU-only (Basic machines, 5 GB RAM / 2 vCPU); GPUs require a paid Team plan.
• Zylora — Deploy GPU functions from any language. Free tier available; free GPU credits are by application only (startups/research/OSS, ~$500 grant per site). Paid plans from $19/month. Sub-300ms cold starts on a shared GPU pool.

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📚 Learning Resources

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

Free courses, books, and tutorials for learning AI and LLMs.

• Fast.ai — Code-first deep learning education. Practical, free courses from fundamentals to advanced.
• Hugging Face LLM Course — Comprehensive free course on transformers, tokenizers, datasets, and deployment. Note: renamed from "NLP Course."
• DeepLearning.AI Short Courses — Free short courses on LLMs, RAG, LangChain, and AI agents.
• Full Stack Deep Learning — Free course on ML engineering: training, deploying, and maintaining models.
• Andrej Karpathy's Course — From-scratch neural network implementation videos.
• Neural Networks: Zero to Hero — YouTube series building neural networks from scratch.
• Prompt Engineering Guide (DAIR.AI) — Comprehensive free guide on prompt engineering techniques.
• Anthropic Cookbook — Free recipes and patterns for working with Claude.
• OpenAI Cookbook — Free examples and guides for the OpenAI API.
• LearnLLM.dev — Free AI engineering course with 110+ lessons, runnable code, in-browser playground. Covers fundamentals to production agents.
• LLM Zoomcamp (DataTalksClub) — Free 10-week course on building LLM applications with RAG, agents, vector search, and evaluation.
• AI Engineering from Scratch — 2026. 503 lessons across 20 phases. Build LLMs, agents, and MCP servers from scratch. MIT. 51K+ stars.

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🏆 Resources & Leaderboards

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

• Perplexity — Free AI search and research assistant with real-time answers and source citations. (HTTP 403 at check time; may block automation).
• BenchLM.ai — LLM leaderboard with 508 models across agentic coding, reasoning, knowledge, math, multimodal, instruction following, multilingual, and voice categories. Ranking methodology BenchAlign v5.7; data refreshed daily.
• The Aggregate — Free LLM leaderboard that fits one daily ranking across public benchmark leaderboards, with a standard error on every rating and each score linked to its source. Covers open-weight and API models alike; no account needed.
• Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard — The primary benchmark for open-weight models. Updated regularly.
• LMSYS Chatbot Arena — Human preference rankings of models. Best source for real-world quality comparisons.
• StudyArena - Free blind comparisons of three AI answers to a study question, with voting followed by model reveal.
• Artificial Analysis — Independent benchmarks for speed, pricing, and quality across providers.
• Hugging Face Models — Search 1M+ models. Filter by license, task, framework.
• OpenRouter Models — Browse models available via API with pricing and free tiers.
• FreeLLM.net — Directory of 505+ free AI models from 30+ providers (Google, Groq, NVIDIA, OpenRouter, and more) with live daily verification. One-click config for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and any OpenAI-compatible tool. Free encrypted key vault; filters for no-credit-card and no-phone-verification providers. Companion list: awesome-freellm-apis (3.4K★). Note: still lists some retired providers (e.g., GitHub Models was retired Jul 30, 2026) — cross-check before relying.
• Ollama Library — Browse models available for one-command local setup.

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👥 Communities

📅 Last checked: October 1, 2026

• Hugging Face Discord — Model releases, discussions, and community support. (Link fixed: discord.gg/huggingface invite is no longer valid.)
• r/LocalLLaMA — The largest Reddit community for running local LLMs. (HTTP 403 at check time; may block automation).
• Ollama Discord — Ollama community for local model enthusiasts.
• LM Studio Discord — LM Studio community.
• Hugging Face Forums — Discussions on models, datasets, and Spaces.
• r/MachineLearning — General ML/AI research and news. (HTTP 403 at check time; may block automation).

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License

To the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.