What is HuggingChat? Everything to know about this open-source AI chatbot

The biggest differences between HuggingChat and ChatGPT lie in what we don't see: HuggingChat is an open-source version of an AI chatbot. It's also more unreliable than its better-known rival — at least for the time being.

Also: ChatGPT's intelligence is zero, but it's a revolution in usefulness, says AI expert

HuggingChat is open source

ChatGPT is built on the GPT-3.5 architecture and it's a proprietary technology owned by OpenAI. The company does offer a paid subscription plan to access its GPT-3.5 API, while the GPT-4 API access is only available via a waitlist. 

Also: How does ChatGPT work?

HuggingChat, however, is an open-source technology developed collaboratively by its parent company, Hugging Face. An open-source project allows users to access and modify the source code to improve the platform and add new properties.

But HuggingChat is not as reliable

ChatGPT's training has turned it into a somewhat reliable AI chatbot — with some limitations. Artificial intelligence is imperfect, so AI chatbots run the risk of hallucinations and misinformation. 

Also: 6 things ChatGPT can't do (and another 20 it refuses to do)

HuggingChat is exceptionally prone to hallucinations, a phenomenon that happens when an AI chatbot responds with information that isn't based on reality. Hallucinations are possible if the bot has issues distinguishing real data from fake data, or if it's trained on a dataset that has errors. 

Google Bard is notorious for hallucinating and giving wrong information, and, though it happens to all large language models, ChatGPT is less known for hallucinating.