Hugging Face has announced the launch of a third-party customizable Hugging Chat assistant, a popular open-source AI code and framework repository for developers.

This new free product allows users of Hugging Chat to easily create custom AI chatbots with specific functionalities. It serves as an open-source alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, offering similar features and intents as OpenAI's custom GPT builder. However, the latter requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month), Team Edition ($25 per user per month, billed annually), or Enterprise Edition (pricing based on demand).

Easily create custom AI chatbots

Phillip Schmid, the Technical Lead and LLMs Director at Hugging Face, announced this on the social network X, explaining that users can "build a new personal Hugging Face chat assistant with just two clicks!" Schmid openly compared the new feature to OpenAI's custom GPT.

However, besides being free, another significant difference between Hugging Chat assistant and the GPT builder and GPT store tools is that the latter two tools rely entirely on OpenAI's proprietary large language models (LLMs) GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision/Turbo.

In contrast, users of Hugging Chat assistant can choose from several different open-source LLMs to power the intelligence behind their AI assistant backend, including everything from Mistral's Mixtral to Meta's Llama 2.

This aligns with Hugging Face's overall approach to AI - providing users with a variety of different models and frameworks to choose from - and the same approach it takes with Hugging Chat itself, where users can select from several different open-source models to power it.

A competitor to the GPT store?

Similar to OpenAI's recently launched GPT store, Hugging Face has also created a central repository for third-party customizable Hugging Chat assistants, where users can browse and use them.

The Hugging Chat assistant aggregation page is very similar to the GPT store page, even visually, with customized assistants displayed in rectangular, baseball card-style boxes with circular logos inside.

Better in some aspects, not as good in others compared to GPTs

Some users in the open-source AI community have praised Hugging Chat assistant as "better than GPTs," including Mathieu Trachino, the founder of enterprise AI software provider GenDojo.ai, who listed the advantages on X, mainly revolving around the user customizability of the underlying models and the fact that the whole thing is free, compared to OpenAI's paid subscription tiers.

He also pointed out some areas where custom GPTs excel over Hugging Chat assistant, including the lack of support for web search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the inability to generate its own logos (GPTs achieve this thanks to OpenAI's image generation AI model DALL-E 3).

Nevertheless, the emergence of Hugging Chat assistant demonstrates the open-source community's continued pace in catching up with closed competitors like OpenAI, aptly named "open" AI, especially following the leak confirmation of Mistral's new open-source model Miqu, which almost matches the performance of the closed GPT-4, still the gold standard for LLMs. But... how long will this situation last?