RWKV-LM VS koboldcpp

Compare RWKV-LM vs koboldcpp and see what are their differences.

RWKV-LM

RWKV (pronounced RwaKuv) is an RNN with great LLM performance, which can also be directly trained like a GPT transformer (parallelizable). We are at RWKV-7 "Goose". So it's combining the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, linear time, constant space (no kv-cache), fast training, infinite ctx_len, and free sentence embedding. (by BlinkDL)

koboldcpp

Run GGUF models easily with a KoboldAI UI. One File. Zero Install. (by LostRuins)
Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured
RWKV-LM koboldcpp
85 183
13,137 6,562
2.2% 9.6%
9.1 10.0
12 days ago 3 days ago
Python C++
Apache License 2.0 GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

RWKV-LM

Posts with mentions or reviews of RWKV-LM. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-14.
  • Ask HN: Is anybody building an alternative transformer?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2025
    You can see all the development directly from them: https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

    Last week version 7 was released and every time they make significant improvements.

  • Do LLMs need a context window?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM#rwkv-discord-httpsdiscord... lists a number of implementations of various versions of RWKV.

    https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM#rwkv-parallelizable-rnn-w... :

    > RWKV: Parallelizable RNN with Transformer-level LLM Performance (pronounced as "RwaKuv", from 4 major params: R W K V)

    > RWKV is an RNN with Transformer-level LLM performance, which can also be directly trained like a GPT transformer (parallelizable). And it's 100% attention-free. You only need the hidden state at position t to compute the state at position t+1. You can use the "GPT" mode to quickly compute the hidden state for the "RNN" mode.

    > So it's combining the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, fast inference, saves VRAM, fast training, "infinite" ctx_len, and free sentence embedding (using the final hidden state).

    > "Our latest version is RWKV-6,*

  • People who've used RWKV, whats your wishlist for it?
    9 projects | /r/LocalLLaMA | 9 Dec 2023
  • Paving the way to efficient architectures: StripedHyena-7B
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
  • Understanding Deep Learning
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    That is not true. There are RNNs with transformer/LLM-like performance. See https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM.
  • Q-Transformer: Scalable Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2023
    This is what RWKV (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) was made for, and what it will be good at.

    Wow. Pretty darn cool! <3 :'))))

  • Personal GPT: A tiny AI Chatbot that runs fully offline on your iPhone
    14 projects | /r/ChatGPT | 30 Jun 2023
    Thanks for the support! Two weeks ago, I'd have said longer contexts on small on-device LLMs are at least a year away, but developments from last week seem to indicate that it's well within reach. Once the low hanging product features are done, I think it's a worthy problem to spend a couple of weeks or perhaps even months on. Speaking of context lengths, recurrent models like RWKV technically have infinite context lengths, but in practice the context slowly fades away after a few thousands of tokens.
  • "If you see a startup claiming to possess top-secret results leading to human level AI, they're lying or delusional. Don't believe them!" - Yann LeCun, on the conspiracy theories of "X company has reached AGI in secret"
    1 project | /r/singularity | 26 Jun 2023
    This is the reason there are only a few AI labs, and they show little of the theoretical and scientific understanding you believe is required. Go check their code, there's nothing there. Even the transformer with it's heads and other architectural elements turns out to not do anything and it is less efficient than RNNs. (see https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM)
  • The Secret Sauce behind 100K context window in LLMs: all tricks in one place
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2023
    I've been pondering the same thing, as simply extending the context window in a straightforward manner would lead to a significant increase in computational resources. I've had the opportunity to experiment with Anthropics' 100k model, and it's evident that they're employing some clever techniques to make it work, albeit with some imperfections. One interesting observation is that their prompt guide recommends placing instructions after the reference text when inputting lengthy text bodies. I noticed that the model often disregarded the instructions if placed beforehand. It's clear that the model doesn't allocate the same level of "attention" to all parts of the input across the entire context window.

    Moreover, the inability to cache transformers makes the use of large context windows quite costly, as all previous messages must be sent with each call. In this context, the RWKV-LM project on GitHub (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) might offer a solution. They claim to achieve performance comparable to transformers using an RNN, which could potentially handle a 100-page document and cache it, thereby eliminating the need to process the entire document with each subsequent query. However, I suspect RWKV might fall short in handling complex tasks that require maintaining multiple variables in memory, such as mathematical computations, but it should suffice for many scenarios.

    On a related note, I believe Anthropics' Claude is somewhat underappreciated. In some instances, it outperforms GPT4, and I'd rank it somewhere between GPT4 and Bard overall.

  • Meta's plan to offer free commercial AI models puts pressure on Google, OpenAI
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jun 2023
    > The only reason open-source LLMs have a heartbeat is they’re standing on Meta’s weights.

    Not necessarily.

    RWKV, for example, is a different architecture that wasn't based on Facebook's weights whatsoever. I don't know where BlinkDL (the author) got the training data, but they seem to have done everything mostly independently otherwise.

    https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

    disclaimer: I've been doing a lot of work lately on an implementation of CPU inference for this model, so I'm obviously somewhat biased since this is the model I have the most experience in.

koboldcpp

Posts with mentions or reviews of koboldcpp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-12-13.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing RWKV-LM and koboldcpp you can also consider the following projects:

flash-attention - Fast and memory-efficient exact attention

ollama - Get up and running with Llama 3.3, DeepSeek-R1, Phi-4, Gemma 2, and other large language models.

text-generation-webui - A Gradio web UI for Large Language Models with support for multiple inference backends.

nanoGPT - The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs.

KoboldAI

gpt4all - GPT4All: Run Local LLMs on Any Device. Open-source and available for commercial use.

KoboldAI - KoboldAI is generative AI software optimized for fictional use, but capable of much more!

alpaca-lora - Instruct-tune LLaMA on consumer hardware

KoboldAI-Client - For GGUF support, see KoboldCPP: https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp

llama - Inference code for Llama models

exllamav2 - A fast inference library for running LLMs locally on modern consumer-class GPUs

Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai
featured

Did you know that Python is
the 2nd most popular programming language
based on number of references?