Guanaco (65B) overview
Guanaco (65B) by University of Washington NLP
Access Guanaco-65B API. Guanaco 65B is an open-source chatbot model that rivals ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo, developed using efficient 4-bit QLoRA finetuning.
Guanaco (65B) specs
- Developer
- University of Washington NLP
- Input
- Text
- Output
- Text
- API
- OpenAI-compatible, base URL
https://api.aimlapi.com/v1
Basic Information
- Developer/Creator: Tim Dettmers
Overview
The Guanaco-65B is a 65 billion parameter open-source chatbot model developed by Tim Dettmers. It is created by applying 4-bit QLoRA finetuning to the LLaMA base model using the OASST1 dataset. The model demonstrates the potential of QLoRA technology, achieving performance comparable to top commercial chatbots like ChatGPT and BARD.
Key Features
- Competitive performance with ChatGPT and BARD on Vicuna and OpenAssistant benchmarks
- Available open-source for affordable and local experimentation
- Replicable and efficient 4-bit QLoRA training procedure
- Lightweight adapter weights that can be used with LLaMA base models
Intended Use
The Guanaco-65B is designed for use as a powerful open-source chatbot model, enabling developers and researchers to experiment with and deploy high-performance conversational AI systems. It can be used for tasks such as:
- Task-oriented dialogue systems
Language Support
The Guanaco-65B is a multilingual model, but the OASST1 dataset it was trained on is heavily weighted towards high-resource languages. The model likely performs best on English and other high-resource languages.
Architecture
The Guanaco-65B uses a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) architecture, with adapter weights added to all layers of the LLaMA base model. This allows for efficient finetuning while preserving the base model's capabilities.
Training Data
The model was trained on the OASST1 dataset, which is multilingual but skewed towards high-resource languages. The exact size and diversity of the dataset is not publicly reported.
Knowledge Cutoff
The knowledge cutoff date for the Guanaco-65B model is not publicly specified. It likely reflects the date of the OASST1 dataset used for finetuning.
Performance Metrics
According to the model's documentation, the Guanaco-65B achieves performance at 99.3 percent of ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo on the Vicuna benchmarks, as evaluated by both human raters and GPT-4.
Ethical Guidelines
No specific ethical guidelines are provided for the Guanaco-65B model. As an open-source model, it is up to developers to use it responsibly and consider potential misuse.
License Type
The Guanaco adapter weights are licensed under Apache 2.0. However, using the model requires access to the LLaMA base model weights, which have more restrictive licensing terms.In summary, the Guanaco-65B is a powerful open-source chatbot model that rivals commercial offerings like ChatGPT, while demonstrating the potential of efficient 4-bit QLoRA finetuning. It provides an affordable and replicable path to high-performance conversational AI.
Use cases
- building high-performance multilingual chatbots for customer support, education, and research
- open research and experimentation in state-of-the-art instruction-following LLMs
- generating in-depth multi-turn conversations, roleplaying, and creative storytelling
- real-time AI-assisted writing, summarization, and code generation
- deployment on powerful hardware for scalable AI services in industry and academia
- machine translation, language interpretation, and multilingual NLP tasks
- adapting and fine-tuning for specialized domains such as healthcare (e.g., MedGuanaco variant)
Capabilities
- Function calling
- Streaming
- Structured outputs
Guanaco (65B) API pricing
| Usage | Price | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.945 | 1M tokens |
| Output | $0.945 | 1M tokens |
Guanaco (65B) is deprecated on AI/ML API. The rates apply to existing integrations; the models below are current alternatives.
Prices from the AI/ML API price list, checked on Nov 4, 2026.
Guanaco (65B) vs other models: token prices
AI/ML API input and output rates for 5 models, per million tokens.
| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| $0.945 | $0.945 | |
| $0.4602 | $0.9205 | |
| Venice Uncensored | $0.2116 | $0.9522 |
| $0.3174 | $0.9522 | |
| $0.3174 | $0.9522 |
Related articles
Guanaco (65B) FAQ
Does Guanaco (65B) support streaming?
Yes, Guanaco (65B) can stream responses as they are generated.
Does Guanaco (65B) support tool calling and structured outputs?
Yes, Guanaco (65B) supports both function calling and structured outputs.
Who created Guanaco (65B)?
Guanaco (65B) was built by University of Washington NLP.

