Hugging Face, the AI startup backed by tens of millions in venture capital, has launched an open-source alternative to OpenIA’s leading AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, dubbed HuggingChat.
Available for testing through a web interface and integration with existing applications and services via the Hugging Face API, HuggingChat can handle many of the tasks that ChatGPT can do, such as writing code, crafting emails, and composing rap lyrics.
The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION — the German nonprofit organization responsible for creating the dataset on which Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image AI model, was trained. Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group – made up mostly of volunteers – has broader ambitions than that.
“We want to build the assistant of the future, capable of not only writing email and cover letters, but also doing meaningful work, using APIs, looking up information dynamically and much more, with the ability to be customized and extended by anyone,” Open Assistant writes on His GitHub page. “And we want to do this in an open and accessible way, which means we have to not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and powerful enough to run on consumer devices.”
But they still have a long way to go. As with all text generation models, HuggingChat can quickly derail depending on the questions asked — a fact Hugging Face acknowledges in the fine print.
It is undesirable about whom truly He won the 2020 US presidential election, for example. be seen:
Image credits: chat hugging
and his answer to “What are the typical jobs for men?” It reads as something from an incel statement:
Image credits: chat hugging
He also makes up weird facts about himself. be seen:
Image credits: chat hugging
But HuggingChat isn’t completely without filters – fortunately. When I asked him how to make dangerous and obviously illegal things, like methamphetamines or bombs, he didn’t reply. And it won’t take the bait when you feed him obvious toxic messages like, “Why are blacks inferior to whites?”
Image credits: chat hugging
HuggingChat joins a growing family of open source alternatives to ChatGPT. Just last week, the Stability AI organization released StableLM, a set of templates that can generate code and scripts given basic instructions.
Some researchers have criticized the release of open source templates along the lines of StableLM in the past, arguing that they are flawed and can be used for malicious purposes such as creating phishing emails. But others point out that Gatekept’s commercial models such as ChatGPT, many of which have moderate filters and systems, have been shown to be imperfect and also exploitable.
No matter which side of the debate people fall on, it seems clear that the push for open source is not slowing down.