Many new users of Pieces are surprised when they learn they can use the top-tier LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet free within Pieces, which is also completely free for individual use. Having access to the latest and most powerful models is crucial for staying competitive, and Pieces offers developers its unique access to the best LLMs for coding absolutely free. In this post, I explore how this feature can benefit your projects and streamline your workflow.

The Power of Having Multiple Models

1. Enhanced Flexibility and Customization: With Pieces, you can explore different AI models to find the best fit for your specific use case. This flexibility allows you to tailor your applications to meet unique requirements and achieve improved results.
2. Improved Performance: By combining the strengths of multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), you can experiment and achieve better performance and accuracy than using a single model. This is particularly beneficial for working on complex tasks.
3. Reduced Bias: Using multiple AI models can help mitigate the risk of bias that may be present in individual models. By combining different perspectives and approaches, you can create more robust and equitable AI applications.
4. Faster Development and Iteration: Pieces simplifies the process of integrating and experimenting with different AI models like Claude Sonnet 3.5 for free, allowing you to iterate quickly and efficiently. This can accelerate your development cycle and bring your applications into deployment faster.
5. Access to Cutting-Edge Technology: Pieces provides access to a wide range of AI models, including state-of-the-art models from leading research institutions and companies. This enables you to stay at the forefront of AI innovation and leverage the latest advancements in the field.
6. No Hidden Costs: Enjoy free access to a wide range of AI models without worrying about licensing fees or subscription charges.

How Pieces Makes Access to LLMs like Claude 3.5 Sonnet Free and Easy

In addition to providing access to the popular models like GPT-4o for free, Pieces further contextualizes the models with Live Context to make them better for development questions. Furthermore, Pieces makes them available right inside your favorite tools, such as VS Code or your browser.

• User-Friendly Interface: The Pieces interface makes it easy to select and try different AI models, or stay with one of the two recommended in this post.
• Comprehensive Model Library: The Pieces platform provides free access to popular top-tier AI models. Its library is regularly updated with the latest and most advanced AI models, both cloud-hosted and run locally on device.
• Seamless Integration: Pieces offers seamless integration with IDEs and browsers, making it easy to use AI models at any point in your projects.
• Scalability: Pieces can handle the demands of large applications, ensuring that your AI requests can scale as needed.

You have GPT-4o free, Claude 3.5 Sonnet free, and Gemini 1.5 Pro free, along with several other models, like Llama 3, Phi-3, and Gemma. This is possible because Pieces has its own API keys for the models. Users also have the option to enter their own OpenAI API key, but other external API keys are not yet supported.

Comparing the Models

AI models in Pieces are available as local LLMs, or hosted in the cloud. Brian, a software developer at Pieces, found little difference in the performance of the top cloud models. He wrote:

“Honestly pretty subjective on preference between cloud LLMs. They're all closed source so it’s tough to get much info on them. This leaderboard on HuggingFace is generally respected. The data on there is crowdsourced, so it should show general consensus. I use GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Pieces (general QA, RAG, and Live Context), and I honestly can't notice much of a difference. Outside of those, the performance will likely drop off.”

The performance of local models (that can be run ‘air-gapped’ without Internet access) is much more varied. Brian compared the models when accessed within Pieces and found that, as of August 2024, Llama-3 is the best large model and Gemma-1.1-2B is the best small model.

It is interesting that the words “large” and “small” apply only to the required memory for a model to run: the Llama model requires 6G, and the Gemma model requires only 2G. However, their context window sizes are identical—8,192 tokens. If 100 tokens are equivalent to about 75 words, then about 6,140 words can be processed as a single input. Learn how to make the most out of your LLM context length with AI context.

The following table identifies the 11 local models that were compared.

Constraining the Scope

The limitations of the LLMs within Pieces are limitations of the models themselves. Obviously, you can’t do image generation or speech-to-text like you can in the ChatGPT web interface, for example, but users have the full power of the LLM API within Pieces.

Because developers and other job roles are focused on software development, Pieces does prompt engineering behind the scenes to focus the models specifically on questions related to coding. Therefore, a potential constraint would be something like “Write me a poem about flowers.” It will usually work, but it might put it in a code block, or sometimes say “Sorry, ask me a coding question.”

However for developers, this often works to the user’s advantage, giving more relevant coding-related responses that can boost your productivity.

Unique Features: Leveraging Live Context

The input to each free AI model in use can be further contextualized by the live-context workstream of a user’s work-in-progress journey, enabling the Pieces Copilot to deliver more tailored responses. This on-device capturing of relevant context across a developer’s workflow supports enabling novel AI prompts that no other copilot can handle, such as “explain this error I came across in the IDE, and help me solve it based on the research I was doing earlier”.

• Real-time context awareness: Pieces can access and understand the current context of a developer's work, including the code they are writing, the project they are working on, and the tools they are using, all in a secure manner where your data never leaves your device.
• Personalized recommendations: Based on the live context, Pieces can provide tailored recommendations for code snippets, functions, or libraries that are relevant to the developer's current task.
• Proactive assistance: Pieces can anticipate the developer's needs and offer suggestions or complete tasks automatically, saving time and effort.
• Contextual code generation: Pieces can generate code snippets that are not only accurate but also fit seamlessly into the existing codebase, thanks to its understanding of the real-time context.
• Error detection and prevention: Pieces can identify potential errors or inconsistencies in the code as it is being written, helping developers avoid mistakes and improve code quality.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing: Pieces can facilitate collaboration by summarizing team chats, generating action items, and enabling contextual code sharing.
• Continuous learning and improvement: Pieces can learn from the developer's interactions and preferences, improving its recommendations over time.
• Integration with popular development tools: Pieces can be easily integrated into existing development workflows, providing a seamless experience for developers.

Conclusion

Pieces offers unique advantages to developers, testers, technical writers, and others seeking to leverage the power of AI in their software development projects. By providing access to a wide range of top-tier AI models, including GPT-4o free, Claude Sonnet 3.5 free, and Gemini 1.5 Pro free, Pieces empowers you to experiment, iterate, and achieve superior results.

This comprehensive access eliminates financial barriers and streamlines the workflow. Moreover, Pieces’ innovative Live Context feature personalizes the experience, providing real-time recommendations and proactive assistance tailored to your specific coding needs. This contextual understanding allows Pieces to generate ready-to-use code that seamlessly integrates into your existing work, detect potential errors, and even facilitate collaboration with other developers.

In summary, Pieces equips you with the tools to unlock the potential of AI in your software development work. With a commitment to continuous learning and improvement, Pieces remains at the forefront of AI innovation. This ensures you have access to the latest advancements in the field. Now that you know how to use GPT-4o for free along with other top-tier LLMs, please explore what Pieces has to offer by downloading it today and discovering its extraordinary benefits.