That’s quite unfortunate. Alpaca needs to support those explicitly to work with the new 3.1 128k models; GPT4All was not compatible with it before update either. There was a bug in some library they was using and needed a patch. So maybe that’s why you can’t use the new Llama 3.1 in Alpaca. (Edit: Never mind. On the webpage they advertise and talk about 3.1 being working, so a wrong guess by me probably.)
Actually that sounds very useful and I missed that option, to be able to select from a set of related models. One thing that GPT4All can also do is, analyzing text files and then using the data to ask questions about it. It will also output the exact lines of the file in relation to the answer. I only experimented a little bit with this, but sounds useful too. The team also experiments and works on a web search using, but no idea how that would work with a local model if ever.