HugginChat: An efficient, free, open “ChatGPT” that doesn’t want your personal data

Since the end of 2023, ChatGPT fever is on the internet. And unless you’ve been living in low Earth orbit for the past few months, you’ve probably been tempted to use artificial intelligence in the form of a chatbot or conversational agent, whether it’s ChatGPT from OpenAI, Cloud from Anthropic, Copilot from Microsoft, or more recently Google Gemini (formerly bard). It must be said that these algorithms are really efficient, sometimes to the point of replacing traditional search engines with simpler and more “human” interaction.

However, conversations with these chatbots are not trivial and nothing is clear about the use of the data you send to companies that often provide services for free during your exchanges. They will likely feed the enormous databases needed to train AIs and their evolution. However, the global enthusiasm around AI offers the possibility to try many solutions, and we suggest that you test the conversational agent available through the Hugginface platform.

Several models are available

Hugginface, created by the French, allows you to test numerous AI models directly in your browser, whether it’s for processing audio data, image recognition, or generating images or music. The platform’s chat agent is called HugginChat.

To test the chatbot, nothing could be easier, just go to the URL https://huggingface.co/chat/. You can then choose to use the AI ​​in guest mode or choose to create an account, which will retain your conversation history as well as certain preferences and settings. Regarding choices elsewhere, note that it is possible to use some LLM models (A large language model) and therefore yield different responses depending on the chosen neural network. If, by default, the French company Mistral’s model is selected (mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1), you are free to switch to LLM developed by Meta (meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat) are you -hf) or OpenChat. These models have the advantage of being developed in open source and are therefore freely accessible to developers.

Depending on your query and your destination of use, different models will probably provide different answers. It is up to you to choose the one that meets your needs.

Take control of your data

Still in the selection section, you have the possibility to refuse the sharing of communication with the authors of the models. Please note, by default, this is, so you must interfere with the application settings before starting a conversation. However, please note that if you share your conversations with AI, your conversations may be used to improve the model.

Like all AI models, HugginChat was trained with time-limited data used. So the answers to your current affairs questions may be out of date, as you can see with our question about the Prime Minister of France.

But HugginChat is able to query the Internet to complete its information, and since then, the agent becomes more relevant.

Friendly helpers

Like the ChatGPTs available on the OpenAI Store, HugginChat also offers the use of personal assistants made available by the community. You can chat with an agent specializing in code generation, image generation and why not… an Italian grandma!

More interestingly, you can create your own custom wizard. For this, it is necessary to resort to some prompt Which will allow you to more precisely define the scope of action of your “entity” to get more specific and relevant answers.