ChatGPT has garnered millions of daily users and demonstrated its versatility in tasks such as writing essays and offering career advice. This success has encouraged other players to create rivals, including Google Bard and Ernie Bot.
Now, Hugging Face has joined the fray with the unveiling of its 30-billion-parameter open-sourced AI chatbot called HuggingChat. The goal is to showcase that it is now (April 2023) possible to build an open-source alternative to ChatGPT.
HuggingChat runs on Open Assistant, created by German non profit LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network). For now, HuggingChat is running OpenAssistant’s latest LLaMA based model , but the plan in the longer term is to expose all good-quality chat models from the Hub.
HuggingChat has been reported to be more prone to inaccurate responses than ChatGPT, but it’s early days, and certainly demonstrates that open source is possible.
HuggingChat is currently available for testing through its web interface and can be integrated into existing apps and services via Hugging Face API. In addition to writing code and drafting emails, the chatbot can compose rap lyrics and perform a wide range of tasks.