Alpaca-LoRA, and all LoRas, are garbage. Alpaca is horrible compared to newer finetunes. Even cleaning the Alpaca dataset and retraining a cleaned Alpaca improves its performance greatly.
But newer finetunes like Vicuna go well beyond that, including hundreds of thousands of real human conversations with GPT-4 ChatGPT in the dataset (unlike Alpaca's fully synthetic dataset).
Vicuna-13B in 16bit is easily comparable to ChatGPT-3.5 in capability. Newer finetunes coming out nearly every day are going beyond chatGPT-3.5 and getting closer and closer to GPT-4 performance.
You don't even have to install anything to validate this for yourself. There's a live web demo of Vicuna-13B right here: https://chat.lmsys.org/ (disable ad blocker if it does not load)