The free alternative to ChatGpt chose Amazon

AWS, the Amazon subsidiary that supplies on-demand cloud computing serviceshas entered into an agreement with the startup huggin face to make it easier to move the work of artificial intelligence to the cloud of the company founded by Jeff Bezos.

in the rush togenerative artificial intelligencethe contribution of Hugging Face is no less important than that of Google or Open AI.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf with the intention of creating an artificial intelligence able to dialogue with human beings, especially with adolescents. A chatbot, basically, just like ChatGpt. At the time TechCrunch wrote: “Hugging Face wants to become your artificial best friend”.

As years go by, the plan of the founders of Hugging Face has changed. First they open sourced their technology, with the intention of making machine learning is more democratic.

And then, in 2021, together with about 1,000 researchers, Hugging Face launched an initiative called the Big Science Research Workshop that for a year focused on a large language model (LLM) that it was open to all. The fruit of this work was Bloom, an LLM based on 176 billion parameters. Large language models, we recall, are deep learning algorithms trained on millions of textsresponsible for the education of generative artificial intelligences – like Bard and ChatGpt – that are amazing the world.

While these new chatbots – to which is added Microsoft’s new Bing – fascinate users, cloud computing companies like AWS rub their hands, because they are the ones who deliver tools and services useful for developers to integrate AI into their products.

To use algorithms that process huge amounts of data, as is the case in applications that use AI, a simple computer is not enough. It takes a lot of powerful processors. And AWS, at the request of individual users, makes computing power available through the cloud that for a small startup, for example, it would be too expensive not only to buy but also to maintain.

Clément Delangue, one of the founders of Hugging Face who today holds the role of managing director of the company, specified that the agreement with Amazon is not exclusive. The startup will work to make it easier for Hugging Face users to transfer and use their codes on the AWS cloud.

But the partnership with Amazon does not end there. Delangue also announced that the future version of Bloom, the large language model that competes with Open AI’s Gpt, underpinning ChatGpt, will run on trainiuma machine learning chip designed and manufactured by AWS.

The agreement made by Amazon with Hugging Face arrives one month after Microsoft’s investment in Open AI: the company led by Satya Nadella has paid – for now – just over 10 billion dollars into the coffers of the San Francisco startup founded by Sam Altman and – among others – Elon Musk. A figure that will allow the Redmond giant to use ChatGpt technology in its Bing search enginebut also in other products such as Micorsoft Teams and the Office package.