A public demonstration of the Alpaca language model has been thrown off course  days after concerns emerged about its safety and costs. 

Developed by researchers at Stanford University, Alpaca was reportedly built on a USD 600 budget by fine-tuning Meta's LLaMA 7B large language model (LLM) and was intended to demonstrate how easy it is to develop a cheap alternative to ChatGPT and other language systems.

Like other language models, Alpaca proved adept at 'hallucinating', or inventing misinformation and disinformation in an apparently convincing manner.

The costs also proved exorbitant. The researchers told The Register, 'Given the hosting costs and the inadequacies of our content filters, we decided to bring down the demo.'