OpenChatKit provides a powerful, open-source base for creating both specialized and general-purpose chatbots for various applications. It's built on top of EleutherAI’s GPT-NeoX model, fine-tuned with 43 million high-quality instructions, and includes tools to fine-tune the model for specific tasks. The kit has four key components: an instruction-tuned large language model, customization recipes, an extensible retrieval system, and a moderation model. OpenChatKit is released under an Apache-2.0 license, allowing users to deeply tune, modify or inspect the weights for their own applications or research. The project includes tools for ongoing improvement with community contributions, such as process for dataset contributions, incorporating feedback, and Hugging Face app for user reports. It's built on top of the Together Decentralized Cloud, which enables fast and efficient training, and is 100% carbon negative.