I haven't been following the AI space very closely, especially outside of OpenAI stuff. How far behind are open source alternatives? 

I've heard about stuff like llama2 supposedly being decent for chat but I'm assuming the agents/function calling and whatnot is a different story?

I like building apps on web3 protocols. DevRel @ ENS Labs. gregskril.com

agents and function calling are external to the LLM I think. you can have a library like langchain do things like this for you and pick model to use as the “backend”

https://persistence.wtf / https://nouns.build

yea not any reason to use it anymore unless your using a non OpenAI model. the new OpenAI stuff will most likely be faster, easier and cheaper

ah right LangChain rings a bell. Is there a reason for someone to use LangChain along with OpenAI APIs, or is their function calling stuff basically a more integrated version of LangChain?