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.