Is Open Assistant a better chatbot than ChatGPT?
It depends. ChatGPT is, as of February 2023, more widely used and produces higher quality output. However, Open Assistant is a fully open source chatbot, which means the code, dataset, and weights will be available to the public to build upon and extend.
How does it being open source make it better for me?
There are a few ways that an open-source version could offer advantages compared to non open-source proprietary software:

1) Transparency - Open source code is available for anyone to see, and a user can determine how Open Assistant works.  Often programmers can learn by inspecting code.  By contrast, proprietary, private systems may not have similar transparency.

2) Free - Open source usually has a free version available that can be implemented and installed by any user

3) Build and Incorporate - You can typically use and incorporate an open-source project, without any restrictions, into your own projects.   This means that you can freely build on top of an open source project like Open Assistant.  By contrast, there may be restrictions on the use of proprietary software.