FREE: Perplexity AI Open Source Alternative (RAG)🤖 STORM AI Standford University ⚡ Can Self-Host

What's going on everybody Josh pook here and in today's video we're going to be looking at an open-source alternative to perplexity AI this tool is completely free it's called storm and it is made by Stanford University get a Wiki like report on your topic storm is a research prototype for automating the knowledge curation process it will create long in-depth reports let's dive right into it [Music] all right so this is a really cool tool as you can see here I'm on

The Storm website we thank Azure Cloud credits and you.com for discounted search API access so they use you um U API for searching um and yeah we can really just get right into it here is the GitHub repo so you can either use storm for free on their cloud or you can actually self host it all right so storm synthesis of topic outlines through retrieval and multi-perspective question asking that's what I guess storm stands for and this is the official GitHub

With Stanford storm right here so you can go ahead and I'll leave this in the description down below I'm not going to show you how to poost it it's very very simple you can literally just follow the steps right here so you can literally just clone the get Hub repo install the required packages such as Python cond and then you install requirements and then you set up a um environment file um or create a secrets.to l file uh open AI key

Etc you can put your Azure base if you're using that and then running storm Wiki locally you just run python um right here and then that's uh yeah you can also customize storm as well so you can decide whether you want it to use open AI model CLA model Etc so all in all if you're self-hosting it it's great you know you're self-hosting something that's you know sort of like a perplexity alternative and um it's it's very solid too we're going

To get into that in just a second the one thing is if you're self hosting it obviously you're using own API key so it's technically not free right so I'm going to show you the 100% free version and this is what it looks like so we're logged in here on the cloud now just before I dive into it um here is perplexity so we have Discovery Library home here we have Discovery Library new session um up here very basic so far

But it's very powerful at the same time and I'll show you that in just a second now perplexed so I'm currently on perplexity Claude and chat GPT now chat GPT is about 20 bucks 25 bucks a month claude's about like 30 25 whatever bucks a month and then perplexity around the same they're all about 20 to 30 bucks a month so I'm probably paying about 60 to 90 uh $100 tax you know per month on on these three tools Alone um

Perplexity is is I really like using perplexity um you know all these tools yes they're cost expens or they they're pretty pricey I guess once you you know for some people but um I just like having them all because I use them in different use cases cool few things about perplexity is they have the um the pro feature right here which it will like um do multiple searches and and get a more refined uh response and you can search different things

Like academic writing math video social and they have a good Discovery page and then now also too they just came out with a new feature called Pages which essentially will build like a page that's kind of like a article page or Blog Page around a specific topic and you can really edit it and I've done a video on pages and it's actually a really good feature so all in all I do like perplexity and I'm definitely going to continue using it

But storm is really good too and um I'm going to start using it a bit more but if you're on a budget or you just don't have perplexity or you don't want perplexity then this is definitely um something you should be using so if we go to discover you can see here it's pulling um some interesting articles like most popular um recent some on different news Etc so we just click on one of them let's just see generating your article it

May take a three minutes so the one thing is it does take not this just cuz it's already in the news it can take a bit longer and I'll show you in just a second but I'm just showing you some of the news stuff just to show you what the article looks like um and they're very long that's one thing you'll see is it is very very long okay and it asks you to give feedback at the end because they're constantly

Trying to improve it so let's go ahead and start a new session now as you can see here it looks like storm is um releas is going to be releasing soon a human AI collaboration mode I don't know if that's similar to what the pro mode is here that could be the case um that's exactly where the pro is in perplexity so um that would make sense now let's just generate a topic on I don't know let's just say how solar

Panels can save homeowners money in Texas okay let's just do this for an example case oh actually yeah so it's going to say please elaborate the purpose of writing this article I'm writing this article as a sales letter SL sales argument that I can um I can use in many different sales slash marketing channels okay let's just keep it simple boom start now probably going to have to fast forward this or cut it let's just see how long it takes cuz

Last time I used this it did take like it says it can take up to 3 minutes did take maybe a minute or two um and the reason being is we'll I'll show you in just a second you can actually see how it kind of came to the specific answers it did and it also that's one and also to um it's very very long it's generating very long form content here so um yeah it's going to take a bit longer so

I'll uh come back once it's done okay so so far we can see it's finished browsing these specific websites forb CNET uh looking at Texas solar panel incentivized buyback programs um solar panels Texas um freedom freedom solar power how net metering Works Texas net metering complete guide so it's really scraping and like diving deep into some of the top um websites which is good that's similar to what perplexity does um but yeah okay so it's still generating the article but just

As it's doing that um we it looks like it did almost finish brainstorming so this button popped out where we can see brainstorming process you can see here basic fact writer so basic fact writer is uh focusing on broadly uh covering the basic facts over the topic so you can see here the bot sort of talking to itself what are the current incentivized or rebate uh available for homeowners in Texas who install solar we got that what is the average cost

Of solar for the typical Texas homeowner you can see it's kind of going through uh you know some of the FAQs here and Economist um the editor specializes in economic analysis so here it's going through asked about three questions then renewable energy specialist so we have different agents asking questions to one another and um that's how the uh brainstorming process kind of works with this tool with storm and as you can see here we got the table of contents on the

Left hand side nicely organized we have summary historical contacts of solar in Texas economic benefits initial and ongoing cost of solar insulation in Texas uh environmental benefits of adopting solar energy realtime impact use cases we have different case studies which is really cool um government rule in promoting net uh solar energy so going over buyback programs Federal Federal and uh State incentives uh renewable portfolio standards property tax exemptions