What’s the best in terms of coding assistance? What’s annoying about gpt 4 is that is seems badly nerfed in many ways. It is obviously being conditioned in its own political bias.
In my experience, the deepseek-coder-instruct family is at least as good as gpt-3.5-turbo on python. Even the 1.3b models are very good (and run okay on cpu), although you should use larger if you have the vram. There are even larger models (30b+) if you are drowning in vram, but I don't think they perform much better at coding than deepseek-coder-instruct 6.7b.
Self hosted 6.7b model is phenomenal in my experience, I actually prefer it to chatgpt a lot of the time. Similar quality code but fewer disclaimers and #todo in my experience. Gpt4 is still a bit better at coding but not by much and it's much slower for me.
The best in terms of coding assistance, and really for anything else, is the original (pre-turbo) GPT-4 used via the API, although this will also be more costly. There are many third-party chat apps that are wrappers around that now if you want a ChatGPT-like experience.
This can also significantly reduce its bias since you are in control of the system prompt. But also, even ChatGPT can be trivially made to behave differently by saying that you're writing a book or making a video game etc, describing a character in it, and then asking it how that character would have responded in such and such situation.
