What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
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- @chipro
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- Jul 20, 2026
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[ Hacker News discussion , LinkedIn discussion , Twitter thread ] Update (Feb 2026) : The full list of open source AI repos is hosted at Good AI List , updated daily. It’s balooned to 15K repos, and you can submit missing repos. You can also find some of them on my cool-llm-repos list on GitHub. Four years ago, I did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem . Since then, the landscape has changed, so I revisited the topic. This time, I focused exclusively on the stack around foundation models
What it can do
Provide a curated, daily-updated list of open source AI repositories
User visit to the Good AI List website → List of 15K open source AI repos updated daily
Accept community submissions of missing AI repositories
A GitHub repo URL or details submitted by a user → Repo added to the crowdsourced list
Categorize AI tools by stack layer
An AI open source repository → Classification into infrastructure, model development, or application development layer
Analyze GitHub for popular AI repositories by keyword and star count
Search keywords (gpt, llm, generative ai) and star threshold (500+) → Filtered set of popular repos matching criteria
Distinguish software repos from tutorials and aggregated lists
Collection of AI repositories → Separated groups of software repos vs. tutorials/lists
Provide a curated GitHub list of notable LLM repositories
User access to the cool-llm-repos GitHub list → Selected list of recommended LLM repos
Why it made the leaderboard
A structured, data-driven map of the open source AI tooling landscape — organized into infrastructure, model development, and application layers — that helps engineers understand what's actually being built and which categories of tools matter for shipping LLM-native products.
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Indexed by a proprietary survey. Corrections welcome.