AI startup Hugging Face, known for its open-source AI tools and backed by significant venture capital, has announced the release of HuggingChat, a free alternative to OpenAI's widely popular ChatGPT. Powered by OpenAssistant, the new conversational AI application offers a range of capabilities similar to ChatGPT, including code writing, email drafting, and lyric composing.
Just like ChatGPT,HuggingChat can be accessed via a web interface and integrated with existing apps and services through Hugging Face's API.
Hugging Face's co-founders, Clement Delangue and Julien Chaumond, emphasize the need for open-source options in the AI market to ensure a more transparent and accessible future for the technology.
HuggingChat's underlying model is LLaMa 30B SFT 6, a modified version of Meta's 33 billion parameter LLaMA model, and is trained on theOpenAssistant Conversations Dataset (OASST1). In a tweet following the release, Delangue noted, "This is a v0 with many limitations but we are iterating quickly on the interface and safety mechanisms & intend to support the next rapidly improving open-source models."
While the results of our initial tests were expectedly underwhelming, we are encouraged by the rapid release cycles and the fast pace of innovation that we see in the open-source AI community. We expect future versions to greatly improve in capabilities and performance.
HuggingChat joins a growing trend of open-source alternatives to ChatGPT, such as Stability AI's StableLM and Databricks' Dolly 2.0.
As the AI community continues to push the boundaries of open-source innovation, HuggingChat represents an exciting step forward for a growing segment of users who advocate and support having accessible, transparent, and accountable AI solutions for users and developers alike.