HugginChat: an efficient, free, open “ChatGPT” that doesn’t want your personal data

Since the end of 2023, ChatGPT fever has taken over the Internet. And unless you have lived in low Earth orbit for the last few months, you have probably been tempted to use artificial intelligence in the form of a chatbot or conversational agent, whether it is called ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, Copilot from Microsoft or more recently Google Gemini (formerly Bard). It must be said that these algorithms are really efficient, sometimes to the point of replacing traditional search engines with smoother and more “human” interaction.

However, conversations with these chatbots are far from trivial and nothing is very clear about the use of the data that you send to the companies that provide the services, often free, during your exchanges. They probably feed the enormous databases necessary for training AI and their evolution. The global enthusiasm around AI, however, offers the possibility of trying many solutions, and we suggest you test the conversational agent available via the Hugginface platform.

Several models available

Hugginface, created by the French, allows you to test numerous AI models directly in your browser, whether for processing audio data, performing image recognition, or generating images or music. The platform’s conversational agent is called HugginChat.

To test the chatbot, nothing could be simpler, just go to the URL https://huggingface.co/chat/. You can then choose to use the AI ​​either in guest mode or to create an account, which will retain your conversation history, as well as certain preferences and settings. Concerning preferences elsewhere, note that it is possible to use several LLM models (large language model) and therefore obtain different responses depending on the neural networks selected. If by default, the model from the French company Mistral is selected (mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1), you are free to switch to the LLM developed by Meta (meta-llama/Llama- 2-70b-chat-hf) or OpenChat. These models have the advantage of being developed in open source and therefore freely accessible to developers.

Depending on your queries and the destination of your use, the different models will probably deliver varied answers. It’s up to you to select the one that meets your needs.

Keep control of your data

Still in the preferences section, you have the possibility to refuse the sharing of conversations with the authors of the models. Please note, by default, these are, so you must intervene in Application Settings before starting a conversation. Please note, however, that if you share your conversations with the AI, your conversations can be used to improve the models.

Like all AI models, those used by HugginChat were trained with time-limited data. The answers to your current affairs questions may therefore turn out to be outdated, as you can see with our question about the Prime Minister of France.

But HugginChat is able to query the Internet to complete its information and from then on, the agent becomes much more relevant.

Friendly assistants

Like the ChatGPTs available on the OpenAI store, HugginChat also offers the use of personalized assistants made available by the community. You can chat with an agent specialized in code generation, image generation and why not… an Italian grandmother!

More interestingly, you can create your own custom wizard. For this, it is necessary to resort to some prompt which will allow you to more precisely define the scope of action of your “entity” to obtain more precise and relevant answers.