[ANNOUNCEMENT] πŸ“£ HuggingChat is closing for now

#747
by julien-c - opened
Hugging Chat org
β€’
edited 1 day ago

I have bittersweet news to share. 😒

We are closing down huggingchat for now.

banner-huggingchat-closing.png

Huggingchat was launched in April 2023 when ChatGPT was just 5 months old and it was still quite hard to deploy a similar service. The goal of this app was to showcase that it was now possible to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT, building on top of the community's models and building blocks. πŸ’ͺ

We also built Huggingchat as a testbed to optimize inference which led to the creation of text-generation-inference which in turn led to HF contributions to SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and other LLM runtime engines since then.

In the past 27 months we've launched:

  • πŸ§™ Assistants, an easy way to bundle a prompt, a model, and some tools into an easily-shareable URL you can send your friends
  • πŸ› οΈ HuggingChat Tools, exposing the full ecosystem of Gradio Spaces straight from within the chat interface
  • πŸ’¬ Many model launches were supported on HuggingChat: from OpenAssistant, all the LLamas, Phi-4, to Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma.... πŸ”₯

The app has always been free and experimental. Today we are closing it to make room for something new and more integrated with the HF ecosystem. You can export your past conversations as a Zip file, to load them into another interface.

If you are looking for a cool alternative interface you should take a look at:

  • LibreChat a clean and simple yet feature-packed chat interface
  • openwebui – does it even need an intro anymore?
  • Scira MCP, an up and coming MCP-centric chat interface

Finally, chat-ui (the codebase powering HuggingChat) is still maintained (GitHub repo).
You can 1-click deploy your own instance using the Chat UI Spaces Docker template.

What's happening to huggingchat  πŸ˜’ ?

julien-c pinned discussion

I hope it's not too long.

no 😭

Also, how do I export my past conversations?

Hugging Chat org

Hi everyone! πŸ‘‹

This is also my last week at Hugging Face and I'm currently working on a simple page to let you export your personal data & conversation history from HuggingChat so you can reuse it on other platforms in the future. Let me know if you have any questions, I'm always happy to answer them.

It was a pleasure building this app for y'all 🫑

This comment has been hidden

Thats sad.

I wished this never happened

For those looking for alternatives:

  1. https://chat.qwen.ai/
  2. https://chat.deepseek.com/sign_in

They both release open weights models on a continuous basis so I'm willing to let them use my data for personal training (just remember to never feed sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers into ANY chat service).

Fare thee well huggingchat, we hardly knew ye :sad_face:

what's the status of if it's coming back eventually or not?

the announcement coming any time but don't know when

When should we wait a replacement for this great service? approximately in what time frame and how will it differ? this is very important to me!

I have bittersweet news to share. 😒

We are closing down huggingchat for now.

banner-huggingchat-closing.png

Huggingchat was launched in April 2023 when ChatGPT was just 5 months old and it was still quite hard to deploy a similar service. The goal of this app was to showcase that it was now possible to build an open source alternative to ChatGPT, building on top of the community's models and building blocks. πŸ’ͺ

We also built Huggingchat as a testbed to optimize inference which led to the creation of text-generation-inference which in turn led to HF contributions to SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and other LLM runtime engines since then.

In the past 27 months we've launched:

  • πŸ§™ Assistants, an easy way to bundle a prompt, a model, and some tools into an easily-shareable URL you can send your friends
  • πŸ› οΈ HuggingChat Tools, exposing the full ecosystem of Gradio Spaces straight from within the chat interface
  • πŸ’¬ Many model launches were supported on HuggingChat: from OpenAssistant, all the LLamas, Phi-4, to Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma.... πŸ”₯

The app has always been free and experimental. Today we are closing it to make room for something new and more integrated with the HF ecosystem. You can export your past conversations as a Zip file, to load them into another interface.

If you are looking for a cool alternative interface you should take a look at:

  • LibreChat a clean and simple yet feature-packed chat interface
  • openwebui – does it even need an intro anymore?
  • Scira MCP, an up and coming MCP-centric chat interface

Finally, chat-ui (the codebase powering HuggingChat) is still maintained (GitHub repo).
You can 1-click deploy your own instance using the Chat UI Spaces Docker template.

Please how can i get my certification hugging face on computer vision

I would happily pay for a HuggingChat subscription. I despise the big proprietary giants and will rather run weak local models than to use them. HC was the best of both worlds... fast, powerful models AND open source. Also, I don't believe HF is evil, but I don't believe that about the proprietary alternatives. Please bring it back, and if you need a subscription to pay the light bill, please offer a plan and I guarantee you we will happily throw money at you! HC was the correct model, and it's the way AI should have been done from the beginning!

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