We all use ChatGPT, although we don’t know what OpenAI does with our conversations. Nor do we know what the architecture of the neural network it uses is, beyond the fact that it is based on the revolutionary transformers. And, of course, we do not have access to the set of texts on which it has been trained. The same is true of other conversation assistants such as Claude, Perplexity or Gemini, less popular options than ChatGPT but quite well known. This opacity on the part of the big tech companies is the price (probably high, although we don’t realise it) that we pay for using their solutions.
The great news is…
There are less obscure alternatives to conversational assistants. If you want your conversations to stay on your computer, you can use LMStudio. An application that you install on your computer and that you can connect to a multitude of LLMs (Large Language Models) that you can also install on your machine.
LLMs are the key piece of any Generative AI solution
It is the component that ‘understands’ what you want and creates the answer. But they cannot be used in isolation, you need software that acts as a frontend, that is, as an interlocutor between the human and the LLM. This software is LMStudio.
The LLMs you can use with LMStudio are much more transparent.
- You can download them to your computer.
- Moreover, their developers usually share the architecture and training data.
The problem is that to use them you need a very powerful and expensive computer with a GPU (the specialised CPUs for working with large models) and a lot of memory. Unfortunately, most of us mortals don’t have such a machine!
We are in luck…
The solution is called Hugging Face. It is a platform that:
- has a multitude of open source and publicly available models and datasets.
- seeks to democratize access to natural language technology
- and enable developers and data scientists to create more advanced and accurate language models and applications.
Although it is not a platform designed for the common user, it has developed a conversational assistant in the style of ChatGPT, with the advantage that the LLMs it uses are open source and, in its privacy policy, it states that it does not store personally identifiable information about the user:
- does not store personally identifiable user information,
- does not share chat data with third parties
- and only uses the conversation data to improve the language model and not for commercial purposes.
All this is an important difference
Which marks an important difference with ChatGPT-type solutions.
And how to use it?
The same as ChatGPT but by pointing the browser to the URL https://huggingface.co/chat/. It’s that easy!
Are you concerned about your privacy?
You probably prefer that the models you use are audited by a community of scientists. And that the code for those models, and the training datasets, are available to anyone who wants to study them.
Just use Huggingchat instead of ChatGPT – you no longer have to be in the hands of OpenAI (or other shady BigTechs) when you need AI to accompany you!