Hugging Face takes on OpenAI's GPTs with new, accessible chat assistants

Hugging Face has introduced a new Chat Assistant feature that allows users to create custom AI chatbots in just two clicks. Similar to OpenAI's GPTs, the Hugging Face Chat Assistant can be defined by its name, avatar, description, and underlying language model, such as Llama2 or Mixtral. Custom system messages can be used to control the behavior of the chatbot, and different message starters are available. The main advantages of Hugging Face Assistants over GPTs include the ability to choose from different open-source models, free inference provided by Hugging Face, and public sharing without a subscription. The feature is still in beta and has some areas that need improvement to match OpenAI GPTs, such as adding RAG and enabling web search. These features are on the roadmap. Another open-source GPT alternative is OpenGPT.