Hugging Chat stands out as a game-changing alternative to established generative AI platforms like ChatGPT. Developed by Hugging Face, Hugging Chat offers an open-source approach, challenging the status quo of proprietary solutions.
But what exactly is HuggingChat, how does it work, and is it better than ChatGPT? Let’s find out!
What Is Hugging Chat?
HuggingChat is a web application developed by Hugging Face, an AI company that aims to democratize Natural Language Processing (NLP) and make it accessible to everyone. It is an AI chatbot platform where you can engage in real-time conversations with various AI models trained on NLP. The platform leverages Hugging Face’s expertise and community to provide a wide range of chatbot models created by researchers, developers, and enthusiasts worldwide.
HuggingChat utilizes the power of Hugging Face’s platform, which includes the Inference API, a service that allows you to easily access state-of-the-art NLP models. You can select different models categorized by themes such as general chat, jokes, stories, trivia, and more.
The models are powered by the Transformers library, an open-source NLP library developed by Hugging Face. This library enables the creation and sharing of NLP models based on the transformer architecture, supporting various NLP tasks like text classification, sentiment analysis, and question-answering.
You can interact with HuggingChat by typing messages in the text box, and the selected model responds accordingly using its knowledge and personality. There is even an option to rate the model’s responses and provide feedback, contributing to the ongoing improvement of the models.
This tool is built upon Hugging Face’s Hub. The Hub hosts a vast collection of models and datasets from different domains and languages, enabling you to customize your chat experience. Additionally, Hugging Chat supports over 200 languages, including major languages and regional dialects.
One of the critical aspects of HuggingChat is its commitment to openness and accessibility. It is free, open-source, and readily available to anyone without the need for sign-ins, verification, or fees. However, it’s important to note that the information provided by HuggingChat has a knowledge cutoff, typically around 2021, meaning it may not have access to the latest information on certain topics.
Is Hugging Chat Better Than ChatGPT?
When comparing HuggingChat and ChatGPT, it becomes apparent that they share many similarities in terms of their AI-based functionality. Both chatbots have the ability to answer questions, write essays, translate text, write code, and perform other similar tasks. They aim to provide impartial and objective responses, withholding from offering personal opinions or preferences.
One notable difference between the two lies in their sourcing of training datasets. While ChatGPT operates its own dataset, HuggingChat was trained using the Open Assistant Conversations Dataset. This difference in training data might impact their responses and performance in certain scenarios.
One major advantage of HuggingChat over ChatGPT is its open-source nature. Unlike ChatGPT, which is close-sourced and cannot be modified by the community, HuggingChat allows you to access its UI code via GitHub. This enables the community to make alterations, improvements, and contributions to enhance HuggingChat’s functionality.
Another benefit of HuggingChat is its instant usability. While ChatGPT requires you to create an account, HuggingChat can be utilized without any sign-in requirements, providing a more accessible experience.
However, on the downside, both HuggingChat and ChatGPT are prone to AI hallucinations, meaning they may generate responses that are not entirely accurate or reliable. It is always advisable to exercise caution and critically evaluate the answers provided by either chatbot.
What are other Open Source Alternative Hugging Chat?
When it comes to open-source alternatives to Hugging Chat, there are several projects and platforms available that offer similar or different AI chat services. These open-source alternatives offer a diverse range of language models with varying capabilities, parameter sizes, and licensing terms.
You can choose the model that best suits your requirements, hardware limitations, and research or commercial usage needs. Let’s explore some of them:
LLaMA
LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, is a collection of models ranging from 7 billion to 65 billion parameters. The researchers behind LLaMA focused on scaling the model’s performance by increasing the volume of training data rather than the number of parameters. They trained the models using the transformer architecture and a vast amount of training data extracted from various sources like Wikipedia, GitHub, Stack Exchange, Project Gutenberg, and ArXiv.
Alpaca
Developed by a team of researchers from Stanford University, Alpaca is an open-source language model based on LLaMA. The researchers fine-tuned the LLaMA 7 billion parameters model using OpenAI’s GPT API. Alpaca aims to make AI accessible to everyone, particularly for academic researchers who can conduct further research without the need for expensive hardware to run memory-intensive algorithms. Although these open-source models are not intended for commercial use, small businesses can still leverage them to build their own chatbots.
GPT4All
Inspired by Alpaca, the Nomic AI Team created GPT4All using the GPT-3.5-Turbo OpenAI API. They collected a significant dataset of around 800,000 prompt-response pairs, resulting in 430,000 training pairs covering various domains such as code, dialogue, and narratives. Notably, GPT4All can run efficiently on CPUs and does not require GPUs, making it accessible to a broader range of users for research purposes.
Vicuna
Vicuna is a collaborative effort by researchers from UC Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, and UC San Diego. They fine-tuned their model on LLaMA using a chat dataset extracted from the ShareGPT website. The researchers claimed that Vicuna achieved over 90% quality compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. Notably, Vicuna improved upon Alpaca by enhancing two key aspects: multi-round conversations and handling long sequences.
StableVicuna
Building upon Vicuna, Stability AI released StableVicuna, a fine-tuned version of the Vicuna 13 billion parameter model. Stability AI further trained the model using supervised finetuning (SFT) and incorporated three different datasets: the OpenAssistant Conversations Dataset, the GPT4All Prompt Generations dataset, and the Alpaca dataset. This additional training aimed to improve the performance and stability of the Vicuna model.
Cerebras-GPT
Cerebras Systems, a technology company specializing in high-performance computing systems, introduced Cerebras-GPT. They released seven GPT-based language models with varying sizes, ranging from 111 million to 13 billion parameters. These models are available for free and can be used for commercial purposes under the Apache 2.0 license. The availability of multiple model sizes allows users to choose models that best fit their hardware configurations.
GPT-J 6B
GPT-J 6B was developed by researchers from EleutherAI and was released in the latter half of 2021. This model, with 6 billion parameters, performs well on various natural language processing tasks, including chat, summarization, and question answering. The researchers trained GPT-J 6B on a large corpus of 402 billion tokens. Like Cerebras-GPT, GPT-J 6B is also licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling commercial usage.
OpenChatKit Model
OpenChatKit is an open-source large language model developed by Together in collaboration with LAION and Ontocord. The training dataset for OpenChatKit was carefully curated, and the model is available under the Apache-2.0 license, granting access to the source code, model weights, and training datasets. OpenChatKit excels in various tasks such as summarization, question answering, information extraction, and text classification. It consists of a 20 billion parameter model called GPT-NeoXT-Chat-Base-20B, as well as a 7 billion parameter model based on EleutherAI’s Pythia-7B model, known as Pythia-Chat-Base-7B.
Conclusion
HuggingChat is an excellent open-source alternative to ChatGPT, offering an instant and free option for exploring a different generative AI experience. With its potential to stand alongside renowned AI tools, HuggingChat provides accessibility and customization, making it a preferred choice for those inclined towards open-source software. Give it a try today and discover everything HuggingChat offers, instantly and free of charge.
