Ava is now open source

8 Dec 2023

After 4 months of work, I am happy to announce that my project, Ava PLS, is now open source!

Ava is an all-in-one desktop application for running LLMs locally. It is using llama.cpp under the hood, so it is compatible with most of the GGUF models which you can find on huggingface.co.

You can download it from avapls.com. It is available for Mac and Windows. Linux version will eventually happen too but I can’t promise when exactly.

It also includes builtin downloader for several models, so you don’t need to spend time searching for the right model and downloading it manually.

Why not open source from the beginning?

When I started the project, I kept it private because I was hoping that I might be able to monetize it somehow. I was definitely not expecting to get rich or anything but every successful project needs some kind of funding.

I was thinking about two possible ways:

  1. I could sell it as a desktop app on the Mac App Store. But IMHO there are not many people who would pay for such an app.

  2. I might be able to sell white-label version of the app to companies that would like to use it for their internal projects. But this never happened, unfortunately.

So I decided to open source it. I am releasing Ava under the MIT license. I hope you’ll find it useful, and I’m looking forward to your feedback and/or contributions.

What’s next?

Obviously, I don’t want to stop working on Ava, but it’s not my primary project anymore. I will be working on it in my free time, and I will be focusing on features that I personally need.

If you’d like to use Ava in your company, I am open to doing some custom development for you. Feel free to contact me at info@tomsik.cz.

I can also do training for your team, or I can help you with integrating Ava into your existing projects.

You can find Ava on GitHub