Hugging Face, the New York-based startup known for its developer-focused repository of open source AI code and frameworks, has unveiled a new product called Hugging Chat Assistants. This free offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the company’s alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to create their own personalized chatbots with specific capabilities. Hugging Chat Assistants aims to compete directly with OpenAI’s custom GPT Builder, providing users with similar functionalities. The key advantage of Hugging Chat Assistants is that users have the freedom to choose from various open source large language models (LLMs) to power their AI assistants, in contrast to OpenAI’s reliance on proprietary models.
Phillip Schmid, Hugging Face’s Technical Lead & LLMs Director, made the announcement on the social media platform X, emphasizing the simplicity of creating a personal Hugging Face Chat Assistant in just two clicks. Hugging Face Chat also offers a wide range of open source models to power the assistant, giving users the flexibility to choose the one that best suits their needs.
Similar to OpenAI’s recent launch of the GPT Store, Hugging Face has created a centralized repository of third-party customized Hugging Chat Assistants. This platform allows users to explore and select assistants according to their preferences. The visual style of the Hugging Chat Assistants aggregator page closely resembles that of the GPT Store, featuring custom assistants displayed in rectangular, baseball card-style boxes with circular logos.
The open source AI community has already started expressing enthusiasm for Hugging Chat Assistants, with some users touting them as superior to GPTs. Mathieu Trachino, founder of enterprise AI software provider GenDojo.ai, praised the user customizability and cost-free nature of Hugging Chat Assistants. However, he acknowledged that custom GPTs currently excel in areas such as web search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and logo generation via OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 image generation AI model.
The rapid development of open source AI models, demonstrated by the launch of Hugging Chat Assistants, highlights the competition faced by closed platforms like OpenAI. Just a day after the leak of Mistral’s new open source model, Miqu, which performs on par with the proprietary GPT-4 model, it is evident that open source platforms are rapidly catching up. The question remains: how long can closed platforms maintain their advantage?
In summary, Hugging Face has made a significant move in the AI space by introducing Hugging Chat Assistants as a rival to OpenAI’s GPT Builder. With its emphasis on customization and the use of open source models, Hugging Face aims to provide users with a free alternative. The launch of Hugging Chat Assistants showcases the pace at which the open source community is progressing, challenging the dominance of closed platforms.
