Generative AI 2024 Retrospective 2024 witnessed a parade of increasingly more powerful AI model releases, culminating in OpenAI’s groundbreaking “o3”. While I’m certain these advancements really are significant, I don’t think they have translated to noticeable improvements for the average user. What people are paying attention to, though, are the really amazing product features that are coming out of Anthropic and Google. I’ve heard a lot about people building software Claude’s Artifacts.

This is a review of Open WebUI, an extensible and user-friendly self-hosted WebUI for LLMs. I recently decided to run my own UI layer for LLMs, as I have some exciting ideas. For those who are not familiar with chatbots, their architecture basically looks like this: While I’m pretty good at customizing the middleware, I’m not as skilled at customizing the UI layer. I tried writing my own UI at first, but I quickly gave up when I realized it was beyond my skills as a frontend developer.

I had two weeks off at the end of 2022. Telesign closed its operations on the last week of 2022 to give employees well-deserved time off for a year of hardwork and I took another week off in addition to that. Like many technologists, I became captivated by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022, and I spent a lot of the last two weeks exploring what OpenAI has to offer.