Explained: What is HuggingChat? Is it better than ChatGPT?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been taking over the world significantly in recent years. It is constantly bringing innovations that have made human and machine interactions very seamless. 
In the past few years, Open AI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been on everyone’s minds. Everyday, ChatGPT has stunned the world with its capabilities. And a new AI chatbot has emerged known as HuggingChat and we will explore what it is, everything you should know about it, and how it compares to ChatGPT.  

What is HuggingChat? 

HuggingChat is an AI chatbot created by Hugging Face, a leading developer of AI tools and technologies. The chatbot uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to create an interaction with the users in a conversational manner. 

Upon the first usage, the platform presents itself with a prompt stating “This application is for demonstration purposes only. AI is an area of active research with known problems such as biased generation and misinformation. Do not use this application for high-stakes decisions or advice. Your conversations will be shared with model authors unless you disable it from your settings.”

HuggingChat has a similar interface as ChatGPT. The platform has a homepage and a simple description that reads- ”Making the community's best AI chat models available to everyone.”  In comparison to ChatGPT, it only shows some examples of prompts whereas ChatGPT also mentions its capabilities and limitations. Moreover, both platforms display prompt history on the left side, along with options for Theme, Feedback, Settings, and About & Privacy.

It is designed to be versatile and can be used for various purposes. The Open Assistants GitHub Page states “We are not going to stop at replicating ChatGPT. We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information, and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone. And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware.”

The platform has pre-built conversational models that it uses to respond to users’ queries and requests. This feature allows the chatbot to provide accurate responses. 

Moreover, the platform is multilingual supporting over 200 languages. Upon asking through a prompt “How many languages does HuggingChat support?” 

The platform generated this response “HuggingChat currently supports over 200 languages, including most commonly spoken languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic, etc., as well as numerous regional dialects and minority languages from around the world. Please let me know if you have any specific language requirements, and I will do my best to accommodate your request."

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What does HuggingChat run on? 

HuggingChat currently runs by the Open Assistant bot which is a project that was created by the Large-Scale Artificial Open Network (LAION) falling under the German Non-Profit behind the Stable Diffusion. 

The Open Assistant model that is behind HuggingChat is based on the Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) which is a foundational model with 65 billion parameters from Meta, that was released in late February 2023. 

What are the limitations of HuggingChat? 

Some reports have claimed that HuggingChat is prone to producing inaccurate data and hallucinations.

To test this out, a prompt stating “Who is the fourth president of the United States?” was put out and it generated this as the first response- “| Term Start | Term End | Party | Vice President(s) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| | March 4, 1809 | March 3, 1817 | Democratic-Republican | George Clinton to May 20, 1812; Elbridge Gerry from November 11, 1813 |”

So, it delivers outputs that might be out of place. Upon following up with the same prompt, it generated quite a long answer which was incomplete. It sometimes stops generating output in the middle of the response so asking it to “continue” with the response won’t work. The model will either stay on the topic or provide completely irrelevant output. 

Why is HuggingChat not working? 

HuggingChat has been recently launched and many users are running to test the new platform. There may be chances that the AI chatbot will load slowly or won’t load at all depending on how busy the servers are. The platform is still in training, so high-quality responses and fast loading time can be expected in the future. 

READ| What is ChatGPT is at Capacity Right Now Error: Meaning, How to Fix It?

How to use HuggingChat?

Hugging Face offers a web-based chat interface and one can use it by following the below steps:

• Go to the Hugging Face website at https://huggingface.co/.
• Click on the Topmost Banner displaying the option of “Start Chatting”
• This will take you to the Hugging Face's Chat page, where you can interact with pre-trained conversational models by typing in the chat box.
• There is no need to log in or create an account. The landing page will be the chat AI 

HuggingChat VS ChatGPT: Which is better? 

The first and foremost difference that lies between the two platforms is their Large Language Models (LLM). These are the datasets that generate human-like responses to the prompts. 

HuggingChat uses Meta’s LLaMA LLM, giving it a slight advantage of access to data collected up to April 2023 whereas ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT family of LLMs which makes it restricted to use the data till 2021 only. 

Another aspect that comes into focus is the accuracy of responses. In a prompt stating “Who won the elections in 2019 in India?” Both HuggingChat and ChatGPT were correct but had different explanations. 

HuggingChat only mentioned the winning party- “The Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP” whereas ChatGPT answered the question in a paragraph format- “The general elections in India were held in 2019, and the results were announced on May 23, 2019. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, emerged as the winner. The BJP, along with its allies, secured a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament) and formed the government. Narendra Modi was sworn in as the Prime Minister of India for a second consecutive term.”  

Also, HuggingChat is an Open Source technology that is developed by its parent company Hugging Face. Under open source projects, the users have access to and modify the source code which can be a trouble. 

On the other hand, ChatGPT is built on the GPT-3.5 structure, and its rights are owned by OpenAI which means one cannot access or modify the model’s source code. 

The next comparison between the two is how one can use them. HuggingChat allows you to directly access the platform through its URL or through HuggingFace's website. On the other hand, to use ChatGPT, you need to create an account or log in to the account.

There is no valid comparison between the two platforms as both the AI models are still in training mode and still improving their responses.