Ch.at – a lightweight LLM chat service accessible through HTTP, SSH, DNS and API

zaik

It seems like the only internet protocols they didn't implement were the ones designed for chat. How could they forget about IRC, XMPP and SIP?

hkt

I'd love a deltachat bot too..

etaioinshrdlu

These can definitely be added

evbogue

This is because when an account generates text in a chatroom it is generally referred to as a "bot".

etaioinshrdlu

Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. I thought there needed to be a good zero-JS LLM site for computer people, and we thought it would be fun to add various other protocols. The short domain hack of "ch.at" was exciting because it felt like the natural domain for such a service.

It has not been expensive to operate so far. If it ever changes we can think about rate limiting it.

We used GPT4o because it seemed like a decent general default model. Considering adding an openrouter interface to a smorgasbord of additional LLMS.

One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat with an LLM over it.

We are not logging anything but OpenAI must be...

FraserGreenlee

I see this is using GPT4o, any plans for something more sustainable? Would be interesting to see an https://openfreemap.org for LLMs.

Perhaps via an RNN like in https://huggingface.co/spaces/BlinkDL/RWKV-Gradio-2

Or even just leverage huggingface gradio spaces? (most are Gradio apps that expose APIs https://www.gradio.app/guides/view-api-page)

ivape

I wonder if a 1B model could be close to free to host. That's an eventuality, but I wonder how long it'll take for that to be real.

codazoda

I’m planning to deploy a 1B model, feed it all the documents I’ve ever written, host it on a $149 mini-PC in my bedroom, and enable you to chat with it.

I’ve released similar projects before.

I’ll drop a post about my plans in the coming days and I’ll build and document it about two weeks later if there’s enough interest.

joeldare.com

indigodaddy

Sounds cool!

giantrobot

A 1B model at 2-bit quantization is about the size of the average web page anymore. With some WebGPU support you could run such a model in a browser.

I'm half joking. Web pages are ludicrously fat these days.

puppymaster

been using it on a plane for the past one month. it's a great way to do some light reading and learning about obscure topics.

dig @ch.at "why is gua musang the king of durian" TXT +short

indigodaddy

I'm a host guy.. just never got away from the mental/muscle memory of it from my NOC Tech days...

host -t TXT "what is your name?" ch.at

w-ll

This is the killer use case. Thanks!

indigodaddy

These are the kinds of sites/tools that make me excited/optimistic about the AI/LLM future in general

indigodaddy

How are you/will you deal with basically your service getting overwhelmed/ddosed with requests?

WhatsName

I find the fact that in this day people can own two letter domains absolutely staggering, based on rarity, those should be worth millions I guess?

SahAssar

I have a few, only bought on open market.

There are still quite a few XX.XX left, but mostly just under obscure cTLDs (unless you are willing to consider IDN/Unicode domains under .ws or similar)

abxyz

They paid about $50k for ch.at. I have a single letter country code domain (3 characters total, x.xx). There are still some single letter country code domains available to register, you could get one for under $1k USD if you want one.

Here’s a reseller with a variety: https://1-single-letter-domains.com/

These guys run a bunch of services on x.xx domains: https://o.ee/services/ like c.im, r.nf, p.lu.

indigodaddy

This was recently featured on HN, maybe could also help

https://www.ahadomainsearch.com/

etaioinshrdlu

Do we know each other :0 :)

nunobrito

There was a time that I owned a one letter domain with a two letter country code.

The cost was about 600 USD and was fun, but problematic as it failed to be accepted as valid email address on many websites.

weitendorf

I own vecs.ai and it's surprisingly hard to find buyers. Domains are really just Xoomer NFTs

nadermx

I mean, ch.at is a incredible domain hack. But not sure it's worth millions. If it was ch.com could get mid six figures and up. But either way absolutely amazing domain.

sgjohnson

unless they are .com, nobody cares.

twostorytower

.ai expensive these days too

alhirzel

What are the economics of this?

mattpavelle

This (or something very similar) was on X last week. The use case was so funny: using an LLM on an airplane connected to WiFi when you had not paid for WiFi … because DNS queries are allowed before paying :)

indigodaddy

Super clever idea/hack!

Nevin1901

use the new gpt oss to have 0 logs end to end. but cool project

JADev62096

logging policy?