Is Dasher still under active development?

[ilia10000]

Just wanted to know if the project been abandoned or if there are still active devs.
If it has been abandoned, are there any other active open-source alternatives?

[gavinhenderson]

Hey Ilia 👋

That question has a long answer.

If by this project you mean specifically dasher-web then the answer is that we are currently not in an active phase of development. Although I wouldn't describe it as abandoned just not currently working on it.

If by this project you just mean dasher in general then yes we are also still active. There is an MIT version that we are currently working out our way forward, you can see that here. There is also the original GPL version you can see here which is still under active development too.

If you don't mind me asking what your use case is? Just want to make sure that we are covering it with any future development we have planned.

[sjjhsjjh]

I was active on this branch a few days ago https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-web/tree/issue58_flat-palette
Finding time is the problem at the moment.

[ilia10000]

Thanks @gavinhenderson and @sjjhsjjh!
In my research, I work a lot with large language models, so I was interested in potentially helping contribute LLM integrations (e.g. GPT3) to Dasher. But I wanted to first understand the state of the project as well as hear from you folks about how feasible/helpful that kind of integration might be.

[sjjhsjjh]

Hi Ilia, Which programming language do you work in? The dasher-web project is written in JavaScript; the others are C++ I think.
Also which Open Source licenses are you happy with? Original Dasher is C++ and GPL, which is non-permissive. This project, dasher-web, is MIT and so will be the new Dasher project.
Cheers, Jim

[ilia10000]

Hi Jim, I used to work in C++ but these days most of my ML work is in Python. MIT license works for me.
I see on the old Dasher milestones from a couple years back that there was a plan to add new language models, do you know if that ended up going anywhere? Don't want to step on anyone's toes or reinvent the wheel if someone's already working on it.

[gavinhenderson]

Hi Ilia,

For simplicity here is some shared terminology:

• Dasher Web
• Dasher-GPL
• Dasher-MIT

There has actually been quite a bit of work done on language models!

The biggest thing is a team at Google created this: https://github.com/google-research/mozolm with us in mind. Its a language model middleware essentially so it will allow us to decouple the language model from the rest of the codebase. The idea is that we want to integrate MozoLM into the Dasher-MIT version which will allow us to quickly prototype and expirement with new language models.

We are currently looking into integrating MozoLM into the Dasher-MIT. If thats something you are willing to help with join us on slack and we can chat further! Join the #dasher channel and post a quick message and someone will get back to you!