Hugging Face Sunsets HuggingChat, Hints at Reinvention Ahead
Hugging Face retires its chatbot experiment as it prepares a more integrated and capable successor
Hugging Face has shut down HuggingChat, at least for now. The open-source AI platform launched its ChatGPT-rival chatbot in April 2023 to demonstrate the power of open-source models. Chief Technology Officer Julien Chaumond announced the closure on LinkedIn, explaining that the team is "making room for something new and more integrated with the [Hugging Face] ecosystem."
The company hasn't shared further details, including if or when HuggingChat will return. When asked to comment, Brigitte Tousignant, Hugging Face's communications lead, suggests monitoring the platform's discussion forums for future updates. In the meantime, users can download their past conversations as a zip file for use in other interfaces.
Introduced 27 months ago as one of the earliest open-source alternatives to OpenAI's popular chatbot, HuggingChat drew attention for its transparency and developer-friendly approach. It became part of a growing chatbot trend, joining the Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's LLaMA, Perplexity, Mistral's le Chat, and others. Like its peers, HuggingChat was capable of generating text, writing code, and answering questions.
That said, it did have some notable disadvantages, specifically that it wasn't reliable. Users complained about HuggingChat's response times. In addition, the app is reportedly more prone to hallucinations and inaccuracies due to having a significantly smaller dataset than its competitors.
Nevertheless, Hugging Face is proud of what it learned from its HuggingChat "experiment." The company's Head of Product, Victor Mustar, posts on X that over the past two years, HuggingChat has supported over 20 open-source models (such as Cohere's Command R+), helped more than 1 million users, and powered over 100,000 assistants. Tousignant adds, "HuggingChat enabled us to experiment with Inference and tools and host many models from the community. It also highlighted a real appetite for open, transparent, customizable AI and provided valuable insights into real-world model evaluation, user interaction, and multi-model deployment. Stay tuned for what's to come!"
Much has changed with Hugging Face since 2023, thanks to the explosive growth of AI innovation. Although the company isn't revealing what its next-generation chatbot might be—or if it will even carry on the HuggingChat name—it’s plausible that the next iteration could leverage the breadth of models available on its platform. By tapping into a wide array of open-source LLMs, Hugging Face could build something akin to Quora’s Poe or You.com’s AI hub—but powered entirely by open technology and the broader developer community.
Alternatively, because HuggingChat lagged behind competitors in feature parity, Hugging Face may be looking to modernize its chatbot with multimodal capabilities and improved scalability. A revamped version could be designed to serve not just individual users but also teams and enterprises, bringing it closer in line with offerings like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.