How to Use Hugging Face to Find New AI Chatbots

Innovation in AI is happening fast—even for a tech enthusiast, keeping up can be difficult. But since Hugging Face, staying up to date with the latest AI chatbots has never been easier.

What is Hugging Face and how does it work?

Hugging Face is a platform and community that acts as a hub for Machine Learning and data science, allowing you to upload, find, and download pre-trained AI models and datasets for model training and evaluation.

There are a lot of AI models available on Hugging Face that can perform different tasks. You will find models for tasks like text generation, classification, image to text, text to image, speech to text, text to speech, etc. From computer vision , audio, natural language processing (NLP) to reinforcement learning, Hugging Face has almost every AI model you can imagine.

Hugging Face hosts some of the most capable AI models available today, some of which can perform 35 different tasks. Some of the most popular AI models available on Hugging Face are ones you may have encountered before, such as Microsoft's Deepseek R1, Llama, and Phi-3. So if you want to try running DeepSeek locally , you can download it from Hugging Face.

In addition to serving as a hub for models and datasets, Hugging Face provides developers with tools to deploy models on the platform or use what it calls an inference API to use many of the available models through API calls for added convenience. And with its vibrant open-source community, the platform fosters collaboration, allowing users to contribute to and benefit from shared models, datasets, and insights.

How to discover new models on Hugging Face

Hugging Face is the go-to platform when searching for new AI chatbots because it hosts millions of pre-trained Machine Learning models. Plus, the site’s easy-to-use interface makes chatbot discovery a breeze. Whenever you want to check out the latest chatbots, head over to Hugging Face’s Models section , which has over 1.5 million models as of this writing.

By default, AI models are listed based on the trending category. You can tap on the Trending option and select Recently Created to see the latest models on the platform. With the Recently Created filter selected , you can see models that were uploaded to the site less than a minute ago.

You can use the Trending filter if you need to find the hottest new models on the site quickly. Since Hugging Face is community driven, users are more likely to try out the hottest new models on the site, which drives up downloads and likes, leading to higher rankings and thus gaining a spot on the trending models.

For example, at the time of writing, Meta has released new Llama 4 AI models. As expected, they are featured in the trending section.

How models work on Hugging Face

Researchers, companies, and enthusiasts share new AI models on Hugging Face, often ready to use out of the box. Listed models act as downloadable or hosted versions of pre-trained Machine Learning models.

These models are typically used through the Hugging Face transformation library, which provides simple access through a pipeline or more customization options by manually loading the analyzers and models. When you navigate to a model’s page, you can deploy to platforms optimized for running models like AWS SageMaker or even fine-tune any pre-trained models.

Alternatively, you can select Use this model if you want to run the model locally. Hugging Face provides instructions on how to run the model locally, so it's pretty user-friendly, even for beginners. If you want to do it yourself, there are some great offline LLMs on Hugging Face that you can start with.

How to Use Hugging Face to Find the Latest AI Research

Hugging Face isn’t just a place to find the latest AI models. The site also has a special section called Daily Papers, which showcases the latest research from the AI ​​community. Featured papers are hand-picked from a variety of sources, including arXiv. Each paper has its own page on the site, highlighting the author, abstract, and more.

To navigate to the Daily Papers section of the site, select the 3-bar icon in the upper right corner and select Daily Papers from the drop-down list.

By default, you’ll see the current day’s featured articles, but the site allows you to see other featured articles from previous days, weeks, and even months. You don’t have to visit Hugging Face every day, though. You can sign up for a newsletter and get featured articles sent to you by email every day.

Hugging Face has become an essential tool in AI discovery, providing a seamless way to discover, test, and use cutting-edge models. Whether you’re looking for a new chatbot to experiment with, learning more about how these models work, or cutting-edge research right from the source, the platform brings it all together in one place.