Hugging Face, an AI-driven startup, has created its own version of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Named HuggingChat, the AI model can accomplish many of the same tasks as ChatGPT, including writing code, drafting emails, and composing rap lyrics. Additionally, it can be tested through a web interface and integrated with existing applications and services via Hugging Face’s API.
The HuggingChat model was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION, the German nonprofit organization responsible for creating the text-to-image AI dataset. Open Assistant’s goal is to replicate ChatGPT, while also aiming to take things one step further by creating the assistant of the future that is able to do meaningful work, use APIs, and dynamically find research information, while being personalized and extendable to anyone and everyone.
While the HuggingChat AI model has the potential to provide many solutions, it can easily derail depending on the questions it is asked, as with all text-generating models. It also will not answer when asked how to make dangerous and illegal things such as bombs or meth.
Stability AI has released its own open source alternative to ChatGPT, StableLM, which can generate code and text from basic instructions. However, researchers have advised that these open source models can be subject to malicious applications, such as creating phishing emails. On the other side, commercial models like ChatGPT have proven to be imperfect and exploitable. As the open source trend continues to grow, it is important to be aware of the possibilities and limitations of these models.