Local models are definitely not as smart as ChatGPT but you can get pretty close! I'd consider them to be about a year behind in terms of performance compared to hosted models, which is not surprising considering the resource constraints.

I've found that you can get faster performance by choosing a smaller model and/or by using a smaller quantization. You can use other models with llamafile as well. They have some prebuilt ones:

https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile?tab=readme-ov-file...

You can also search for other llamafiles for other models on HuggingFace by using the llamafile tag.

https://huggingface.co/models?library=llamafile&sort=trendin...

And you can download model weights directly and use them by providing an -m flag to llamafile but that's getting a bit less straightforward.

https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile?tab=readme-ov-file...