Hugging Face, the US-based AI startup that focuses on open-source machine learning, has launched an open-source alternative to ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat.
According to the company, “the goal of this app is to showcase that it is now (April 2023) possible to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT”.
Clement Delangue, the CEO & Co-founder of Hugging Face, tweeted, “I believe we need open-source alternatives to ChatGPT for more transparency, inclusivity, accountability and distribution of power. Excited to introduce HuggingChat, an open-source early prototype interface, powered by OpenAssistant, a model that was released a few weeks ago.”
He added that the current chatbot is a v0 with many limitations but the team is iterating quickly on the interface and safety mechanisms and intend to support the next rapidly improving open-source models.
In this particular version of the chatbot, says the company, they only store messages to display them to the user, not for any other usage (including for research or model training purposes).
“For now, it’s running OpenAssistant’s latest LLaMA based model (which is one of the current best open source chat models), but the plan in the longer-term is to expose all good-quality chat models from the Hub,” the company said.
