[notsylver]

IMO, the main reasons are (but are definitely not limited to):

- You can fine tune these models for very specific tasks, which GPT-4 might not be as good at.

- Open source models are free. You can use them as much as you want without worrying about a $xx,xxx bill at the end of the month which makes tinkering with them easier.

- Smaller models like this can run on consumer hardware, even phones, and can run offline.

- Privacy and not having to abide by a third parties terms. You don't have to deal with "As a large language model...", especially with uncensored models.

- Tools like jsonformer https://github.com/1rgs/jsonformer are not possible with OpenAIs API.

- It's also just really cool, let's be honest.