What is HuggingChat?

Could this become a rival to ChatGPT?

Hey Everyone,

I’m very interested in the closed vs. open debate of ChatGPT like agents. I sort of love this story! Hugging Face, the AI startup backed (TechCrunch) by tens of millions in venture capital, has released an open source alternative to OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chabot, ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat.

So here’s the thing, HuggingChat, is a free to use open source ChatGPT clone is released. No registration necessary.

I don’t fully trust Microsoft or OpenAI taking my data, here at least I feel a bit more at ease.

So there’s these “decentralized collectives” of A.I. researchers who actually want to democratize A.I. along with companies like Stability A.I. who are trying to be more of an open-model.

The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION — the German nonprofit responsible for creating the dataset with which Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI model, was trained. Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group — made up mostly of volunteers — has broader ambitions than that.

Hugging Face is a company and an AI community. It provides access to free open source tools for developing machine learning and AI apps. It’s vibe is pretty democratic and open-source friendly so I’m glad they have managed to put out something like this. I don’t expect GPT-4 like quality, GPT-3.5 would be fine.

There’s been a lot of debate about privacy and ChatGPT recently. After a ban by Italy they rushed out a privacy product support, though how can we even trust it? One of Hugging Face’s recently completed projects is a 176 billion parameter large language model called Bloom, which is available to anyone who agrees to abide by their Responsible AI license.

That Italy reinstated ChatGPT is mind-boggling.

HuggingChat is just the beginning for the open-AI team.

“We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone,” Open Assistant writes on its GitHub page. “And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware.”

• Open Assistant itself is a project of the non-profit Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION).

• LAION is a global non-profit organization dedicated to providing access to cutting edge technology as open source.

• How can open-sources compete with highly hyped commercial powers like OpenAI and Microsoft? It’s not quite clear to me.