FNfnordpiglet·Jan 2, 2024
It’s not that big a task as all that. There are a lot of unaligned models available, and user interfaces that aren’t that hard to use.
https://github.com/henk717/KoboldAI
In AI generated security reports about curlhenk717
KoboldAI
C++2023–2024
henk717 / KoboldAI
KoboldAI
KoboldAI is generative AI software optimized for fictional use, but capable of much more!
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
439GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
KoboldAI is generative AI software optimized for fictional use, but capable of much more!
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2023-03-12 00:59:40 UTC to 2024-01-02 20:51:00 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 2023 | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Apr 2023 | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2023 | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2023 | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2023 | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2023 | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2023 | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2023 | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Nov 2023 | 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2023 | 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesIt works like this:
- The AI Horde hosts a web app (Kobold Lite) geared towards LLM chat/instruct. Its mature, predating LLAMA and GPT 3.5 and largely developed when the RP community was running GPT-J finetunes. There are desktop apps that can access this API as well.
- The user sets the chat syntax/format and picks a LLM host (or multiple hosts).
- These hosts run API endpoints on their own PCs/servers for Horde users to access. The backends du jour are koboldcpp, a frontend for llama.cpp which is excellent, portable and literally one click, and KoboldAI, with the very fast and vram-efficient exllamav2 backend:
https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp
https://github.com/henk717/KoboldAI
- Hosts pick a quantized community LLM to run, which is (IMO) the real magic of this system. Cloud services tend to run generic Llama chat/instruct models,
Read the rest
OpenAI API models, or maybe a single proprietary finetune, but the Llama/Mistral finetuning community is red hot. New finetines and crazy merges/hybrids that outperform llama-chat in specific tasks (mostly Chat/Storytelling/RP) come out every day, and each one has a different "flavor" and format:
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=mistral+g...
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=13b+exl2
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified&search=20b
- The horde workers then earn "kudos" for serving requests to clients. Anyone can use the kobold horde with no login, but when requests are queued, kudos earn hosts priority access to LLMs other hosts are running.
I really like this scheme. Perverse incentives for spamming and such are minimal. Its free and easy for users on old hardware, but excessive leechers are deprioritized through the kudos system. It encourages experimentation with hosting (and trying) new finetunes, and gives hosts access to models they normally wouldn't know about or can't run. The horde API seems relatively simple and cheap to host, since its just text prompts/responses bouncing around. Its easy for me to host on a spare laptop, or in the background when I am not stressing my desktop GPU.
There seems to be tons of interest in making LLMs "easy" to play with and giving access to GPU-poor users, but Kobold Horde has somehow flown under the radar.
Massively diverse community working on the AUTOMATIC1111 of textgen at https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/
Ooba's textgen webui runs LLaMA 4bit on 8GB VRAM consumer video cards.
KoboldAI (https://github.com/henk717/KoboldAI/) by the creator the AI Horde of stable diffusion fame also supports LLaMA and has forked the Stable Horde for textgen. Currently horde is running half a dozen LLaMA models accessible at http://lite.koboldai.net/
In Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment