OpenChatKit provides a powerful, open-source base to create both specialized and general purpose chatbots for various applications. The kit includes an instruction-tuned 20 billion parameter language model, a 6 billion parameter moderation model, and an extensible retrieval system for including up-to-date responses from custom repositories. It was trained on the OIG-43M training dataset, which was a collaboration between Together, LAION, and Ontocord.ai. Much more than a model release, this is the beginning of an open source project. We are releasing a set of tools and processes for ongoing improvement with community contributions.