How to run Alpaca.cpp (Historical Reference - 2023)

⚠️ Historical Note (Updated 2025)

This article documents the early days of local LLM deployment from March 2023. For modern local LLM deployment, we recommend using Ollama, which provides a much better user experience with support for the latest models including Llama 3, Mistral, and many others.

See our updated guide: Setting up Ollama for current best practices.

1. Install (Historical - 2023)

1. Git clone alpaca.cpp github repository

git clone [email protected]:antimatter15/alpaca.cpp

2. Download the ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin from Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/Sosaka/Alpaca-native-4bit-ggml/tree/main

3. Build

make chat

2. Using it

Modern Alternatives

The LLM landscape has evolved significantly since 2023:

• Ollama - Modern, user-friendly local LLM deployment
• Hugging Face Transformers - Production-ready model deployment
• LM Studio - GUI application for running LLMs locally
• llama.cpp - Continued evolution of the original cpp implementation

🤖 Browse all LLM articles and machine learning guides for more AI deployment patterns.