Comparisons between Cai and Lightshade for those looking for an alternative
(Repost from another post with an update)
I’ve been seeing people talking increasingly about moving from Cai to new platforms as well as Lightshade’s new base of users. So I thought I’d do an initial look and breakdown of their pros and cons. This is a very messy quick look at it all, I plan to follow it up later with more tandem use :) as well I’m planning to port my bots over for Lightshade users within the next few days/weeks.
Notes: I chose a model for Lightshade based on their openly available benchmark tests for models (I’ll be honest this alone was impressive and I respect that much as a creator and user). I think between choosing user models and also optimizing bots for certain models these are so useful.
As a creator:
- similar interfaces, more characters and tokens to use on lightshade
- To be honest they feel basically the same, I just believe that lightshade doesn’t have ai generated photos on site
- From what I can see lightshade has better creator visibility at the moment due to low creator numbers
As a User:
- Cai: we all know it pretty well, I haven’t fully trialed PipSqueak 2 but the bots require training pretty intensively at times on free models to behave well for rp based conversations
- Cai+: I’ve been an enjoyer of Deepsqueak, with some light training the bots work well. It has its restraints and usage can slow or become worse with extensive site load.
- Lightshade: based off my initial reactions (I plan to use this for a little in tandem with Cai to develop more context) the bot follows its description pretty well and doesn’t seem to speak for your character as much as Cai’s without training. With training the bot seems to function similar to some older models of Cai. For full roleplays with good memory I found their model Nano had the best benchmark so it’d what I’ve used to trial.
Its drawbacks: its slow, admittedly having to wait for a public channel to open to start developing a response can suck. I haven’t fully tested on it so I could be missing long term drawbacks.
Update:
As a creator-
The dashboard features are literally so interesting, you obviously can’t see chats but you can see statistics which is something I’ve always wanted to (average chat time, number of interactions and number of chats open, as well as how often people are swiping on chats!)
As a user-
The replies are long, detailed, continue a story and develop, I’ve found it keeps character motivations as well, honestly I’m actually enjoying using this despite the slight lag on swiping or getting new messages. I wish there was an app of course because I hate using my browser, and I wouldn’t mind a subscription to jump the line of response times or have access to beta features. But I think that’s just me wanting faster responses (slightly spoiled with Cai there I’ll admit).
Anyways I’ll be continuing to use Lightshade and trying to formulate better comparisons and explanations! I’d love to see how this pans out for long term ones as I’ve got plenty of experience with long term rps on Cai.
NOTE; And before anyone asks I’m not being paid to try this app, I’m a Cai bot maker and active Reddit user for Cai. I’ve avoided leaving Cai for many reasons, but I think one of those possibly undisclosed ads worked on me and I’ve been interested in testing a new app like I’ve done for the different LLMs on Cai to help explain and recommend them to new or casual users. It’s a weird hobby I have lol.