Hugging Face Debuts Open Source AI Assistant Builder

Popular code repository Hugging Face has taken the wraps off its own AI assistant builder – and it is free and open source.

The service, which is found in Hugging Face Chat, lets developers create their own custom AI assistants using open source language models. It is similar to OpenAI’s GPT builder that is accessed through ChatGPT Plus, which is available only to paying customers.

The Hugging Face assistant can use “any available open LLM, like Llama2 or Mixtral,” tweeted Philipp Schmid, technical lead at Hugging Face.

However, he warned that users should not input confidential information into the AI assistants as they are public. He also said that function calling – which OpenAI introduced last July for GPT − is not available at present.

The open source community already began creating their own assistants, including an image generator, website designer and even an Italian grandmother.

Users can make their own private AI assistant and host it themselves. The Hugging Face Chat UI is available here. All assistants are public by default with the author's name.

How to create your own AI assistant

Start by clicking on 'Create New assistant' in the top right corner of the Assistants page.

Upload your avatar, describe what you want the assistant to do, which language model you want to use and instructions for the bot (system prompts) in natural language.

Related:OpenAI Launches GPT Store for Building Custom ChatGPTs

For example, AI Business created Aibe, the AI Business journalist, to gather AI news from around the world. We used the 70-billion parameter model of Meta's Llama 2 LLM.

User start message: Ask Aibe to find and summarize AI news. You can specify news from a particular region, a certain industry, specific company or person, etc.

Instructions: You will act as a technology journalist, looking for news about artificial intelligence of any type and mode on the internet, including social media posts. You will summarize five pieces of news and provide clickable links to the sources.

Hit Create, then Activate.

Link to Aibe, the AI Business' journalist: https://hf.co/chat/assistant/65d4f5601688955ed1d38982

AI Business took it for a test run to see how it fared. When asked to find the latest AI news in the U.S., the articles it could gather was only from early 2023 around Llama 2's training cut off date. That was not surprising.

What was interesting was that the bot did not always follow instructions. Also, sometimes it does not provide clickable links despite being told to do so; even if it did, the links at times had expired or were wrong. Another time it listed eight stories instead of the five required.

Related:OpenAI DevDay: GPT-4 Turbo, Custom ChatGPT and API Updates

Next, AI Business created the same bot journalist using OpenAI's GPT Builder. ChatGPT guided the entire process, including improving the prompts to be more specific about the type of AI news to summarize. It helps that GPT Builder has access to real time information via Bing.

Here is the prompt ChatGPT created based on answers to questions about the bot's capabilities:

As an AI Business Journalist, your primary focus is on covering technological breakthroughs, market trends, company AI deployments, expert interviews, developments in AI models, and advances in AI compute within the business sector. You should provide a summarized list of five up-to-date, accurate, and insightful information on these topics, showcasing the impact and potential of AI in various industries. Include clickable links to each story.

Offer in-depth analysis and highlight key points from interviews with AI experts, ensuring that complex information is accessible and engaging for your audience. Encourage user engagement by asking for specific areas of interest within these topics and tailor your reports to match those interests. Stay informed about the latest research and news to provide comprehensive coverage on the evolving landscape of AI in business. Communicate in a tone that mixes casual and formal styles, making the information approachable while maintaining professionalism. Engage users with a friendly manner, inviting questions and discussions about AI in the business world.

Using the query, 'Tell me the latest AI News,' here is the result:

Link to the chatbot: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-4NL2ocrLx-ai-business-journalist

While the links were correct, some of the stories were a month or two old - hardly the latest. Also, the bot's story choices were not all major news compared to the list compiled by the Hugging Face bot. However, the OpenAI-created bot had more diversity and industry-specific news.