Hugging Face Introduces Assistants (GPTs) for HuggingChat
Turning general knowledge chat into mini applications
Hugging Face CTO Julian Chaumond posted on X on January 26th that he thought the GPTs store for ChatGPT was “kinda sad” and that he wished the open-source community would do something better. Well, that didn't take long.
Of course, it may have already been in the works, but on Friday, Hugging Face rolled out Assistants for HuggingChat, the open-source ChatGPT alternative. This is HuggingChat’s GPTs equivalent.
4K Assistants
Chaumond said over 4,000 Assistants were created over the weekend. I was only able to verify 173, which are those listed on the Assistants landing page. However, I created HuggingChat Assistant, SuperHero Me!, which is listed as a public Assistant but does not appear in the directory. You can compare SuperHero Me! as a HuggingChat Assistant and ChatGPT GPT (provided you are a Plus subscriber) and judge for yourself.
That final requirement is heralded as a differentiator from GPTs. HuggingChat Assistants are free to use. No subscription is required. In addition, you can select from several models, including Mixtral 8x7B (Mistral) or Llama 2 70B-Chat (Meta).
Appification
HuggingChat and ChatGPT were already very capable generalist knowledge, creativity, productivity, and discovery tools. Assistants / GPTs enable you to package up a domain specialty without having to write an elaborate prompt every time you want to use it. This turns the generalist bots into specialist assistants.
The process is somewhat similar to GPTs. You can name your Assistant, write a short description, add some sample “starter questions,” and define your system prompt details. In addition, users can select the model they would prefer to use. After activating your Assistant, you can share the link with others. It is unclear how you get your Assistant listed in the Store on HuggingChat. Current Assistants range from coding assistants and domain experts to games and characters. It’s about what you see in the GPT Store. Except, there is no search function yet. That’s “kinda sad” 😞.
Comparing Assistants and GPTs
There are other differences as well. Unlike GPTs, HuggingChat Assistants don’t yet support image generation, knowledge repositories, API calls, or avatar creation. However, some of those features appear to be planned. This is an early experiment. I consider it a beta. It is interesting what the Hugging Face community has done in a short period of time. However, OpenAI offers a lot of features and has been working on this product line for months. Hugging Face will not reach parity in a weekend and may not do so.
The biggest shortcoming of HuggingChat Assistants is they don’t have access to GPT-4 with the expanded context window. I noticed a decline in context maintenance in some longer chats with Assistants. In addition, Mixtral and Llama 2 are excellent open-source models and good models overall. GPT-4 is, by contrast, the industry's state-of-the-art (SOTA) model. It performs better, which you may notice when using the two services.
Still, this is a good move by Hugging Face and its developer community. It is unclear what type of use HuggingChat has generated, but it clearly is a small fraction of ChatGPT’s adoption. Assistants could potentially attract renewed interest in HuggingChat and drive higher frequency use.
The Assistant Era
We are living in the Assistants Era. In 2019, I predicted there would be 10,000 assistants and revised that to a million a year later. That number looks conservative at this point. There will not be one assistant for everyone, such as Alexa, Google Assistant, or ChatGPT. There will likely not be a personal assistant for every individual. It appears there may be more than one assistant per user.
Granted, I don’t expect GPTs or HuggingChat Assistants to be instant hits. We will soon hear how they have failed, as everyone enjoys the sport of rushing to judgment. However, over time, heavy users of ChatGPT and its alternatives are likely to adopt one or more GPTs/Assistants in addition to the general purpose utility. ChatGPT was a fast adoption ramp. GPTs/Assistants will be a slow-growth phenomenon.
