In total, the AI startup has raised $395 million over the past few years to now reach $4.5 billion in valuation. Here’s everything you need to know about Hugging Face and HuggingChat.
What is HuggingChat?
HuggingChat is an artificial intelligence chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It has garnered millions of daily users since its launch in fall 2022.
Like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard and other AI chatbots, HuggingChat is a generative AI tool that can create texts such as summaries, letters, emails and song lyrics. The AI chatbot can also debug and write code, create Excel formulas, and answer general questions, just like ChatGPT does.
Who owns HuggingChat?
HuggingChat was started by Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence company founded in 2016. The open-source company builds applications and assets using machine learning and functions as a platform where users can share different models and datasets .
HuggingChat currently uses Open Assistant, a bot that was created by the Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION), the German non-profit organization behind Stable Diffusion.
The Open Assistant model behind HuggingChat is based on the Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA), a model with 65 billion Meta parameters, released at the end of February 2023.
How do I access HuggingChat?
To access HuggingChat, simply go to HuggingFace.co/Chat and start a conversation. There is no need to log in to Hugging Face or create an account to access AI chat. The home page will be the chat window.
How is HuggingChat different from ChatGPT?
The biggest differences between HuggingChat and ChatGPT are in what we don’t see: HuggingChat is an open-source version of an AI chatbot. It’s also less reliable than its more well-known rival, at least for now.
HuggingChat is free software
ChatGPT is built on GPT-3.5 architecture and it is a proprietary technology owned by OpenAI. The company offers a paid subscription to access its GPT-3.5 API, while access to the GPT-4 API is only available on a waitlist.
HuggingChat, on the other hand, is an open-source technology co-developed by its parent company, Hugging Face. An open-source project allows users to access and modify the source code to improve the platform and add new properties to it.
But HuggingChat is not as reliable
ChatGPT’s training turned it into a relatively reliable AI chatbot, but with some limitations. Since artificial intelligence is imperfect, AI chatbots run the risk of hallucinations and misinformation.
HuggingChat is particularly prone to hallucinations, a phenomenon that occurs when an AI chatbot responds with information that is not based on reality. Hallucinations are possible if the robot has difficulty distinguishing real data from fake data, or if it was trained on a data set with errors.
Google Bard is notorious for his hallucinations and the misinformation he gives. Although it happens to all major language models, ChatGPT is less known for its hallucinations.
Why is HuggingChat not responding?
HuggingChat may be slow to respond or not respond at all at times, depending on server activity. The AI platform is constantly being improved and updated, as it is still in formation, so higher quality responses and faster loading times are to be expected in the future.
How do people use HuggingChat?
Just like other AI chatbots, HuggingChat can be used to request information, complete tasks, and entertain.
As with all generative AI tools, the quality of the response you get will largely depend on how well your posts are written (prompt). HuggingChat can help users generate text in different styles and formats, perform translations, answer questions, and become a useful productivity tool for various tasks such as coding and writing.
What are the limits of HuggingChat?
HuggingChat is more prone to hallucinations and providing inaccurate information than the popular ChatGPT because its dataset is nowhere near as large as its competitor.
The AI chatbot is aware of these limitations, however, and often reminds the user of them. At one point, when I asked him for a joke and he didn’t respond, his next response was, “Please note that I’m still learning how to generate jokes effectively, so my response won’t always be up to par.”
Another example, when I asked HuggingChat if it was better than ChatGPT, it replied the following: “Yes, I am a GPT language model developed by OpenAI. My goal is to generate text similar to that of a human and answering questions based on the information provided in my training data”, which is clearly misinformation.
Although Hugging Face may use different models in HuggingChat in the future, Open Assistant is still looking for volunteers to help train its AI chatbot.
Source: “ZDNet.com”