[ANNOUNCEMENT] πŸ“£ HuggingChat is closing for now

#747
by julien-c - opened
Hugging Chat org
β€’
edited 2 days 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

Hi, quick update regarding personal data, we decided to erase all the user data stored in the database in two weeks. So heads up you have two weeks to back up your data if you want to :)

I love you. This, and the privacy policy, are the reasons I only trust HuggingFace for AI purposes.

Hey @julien-c , and @nsarrazin ,

first of all, thank you for your service. :) It will be missed! That being said, when I try to export my data from the app, nothing happens. The button just goes gray. I'll try from a (mobile) browser next, but I'll have to wait. Is it working for others, via the app?

Thank you fir your service it was a great run. Hopefully I can one day see something as great as this again. Goodbye for now hopefully :)

Hugging Chat org

@camypaj when you click the button it should download a .zip file, it can be quite big depending on how many files you have uploaded, mine was about 70MB.

I think it will work best from a browser indeed, let me know if you still have issues then

thanks, @nsarrazin . From DuckDuckGo it prompted me to save it, and then there was a "network error", so it failed. Will try from a desktop computer next, but it looks promising.
In the meantime, check the logs, if you can, perhaphs I'm not the only one with an issue - thanks again!
Edit: so, it worked from the computer. There is a quirk, though. If you want to download more than one export from the computer, if you log in to huggingface.co first, and then click "Sign in with Hugging Face" it works, but if you click the "logout", it does not log you out from the website, just from the chat. So that means that if you want to log in with your second account, you have to separately log out from the website, and log in to your other account first. Another solution would be to use a private window, but that works only for the second account, and I had to back up 3. :) Hope it helps, and thanks again @nsarrazin !

...so how does one delete the chats now? It's nice to have a way to download them but what if I want them deleted??

@frehug5 - they will get deleted automatically, after 2 weeks, but I'm not aware of a way to delete them manually. see here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingchat/chat-ui/discussions/747#686549e2bdf5c0d4b1c8e410
Perhaps @nsarrazin can implement something, as hinted here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingchat/chat-ui/discussions/747#6864cd05458c0638c73c1bd3

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 🫑

Chat-ui was an amazing platform , thank you so much for building such an amazing platform. Wish you all the best for your future

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