Hugging Face Launches Open Source AI Assistant Maker To Rival OpenAI's Custom GPTs

Carl Franzen reports via VentureBeat: Hugging Face, the New York City-based startup that offers a popular, developer-focused repository for open source AI code and frameworks (and hosted last year's 'Woodstock of AI'), today announced the launch of third-party, customizable Hugging Chat Assistants. The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup's open source alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI's custom GPT Builder â' though that requires a paid subscription to ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month), Team ($25 per user per month paid annually), and Enterprise (variable pricing depending on the needs).

Phillip Schmid, Hugging Face's Technical Lead & LLMs Director, posted the news on the social network X (formerly known as Twitter), explaining that users could build a new personal Hugging Face Chat Assistant 'in 2 clicks!' Schmid also openly compared the new capabilities to OpenAI's custom GPTs. However, in addition to being free, the other big difference between Hugging Chat Assistant and the GPT Builder and GPT Store is that the latter tools depend entirely on OpenAI's proprietary large language models (LLM) GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision/Turbo. Users of Hugging Chat Assistant, by contrast, can choose which of several open source LLMs they wish to use to power the intelligence of their AI Assistant on the backend, including everything from Mistral's Mixtral to Meta's Llama 2. That's in keeping with Hugging Face's overarching approach to AI -- offering a broad swath of different models and frameworks for users to choose between -- as well as the same approach it takes with Hugging Chat itself, where users can select between several different open source models to power it.

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