Oct 23 (Reuters) - Hugging Face on Wednesday said it is

releasing a new open-source software offering with Amazon.com ( AMZN )

, Alphabet's Google and others aimed at

lowering the costs for building chatbots and other AI systems.

New York-based startup Hugging Face has become a central

place where AI software developers share code with one another

and is valued at $4.5 billion. It is a key distribution point

for open-source AI technologies such as Meta Platforms' ( META )

Llama.

But translating those open-source AI models into a working

chatbot that runs on chips from Nvidia ( NVDA ) or Advanced

Micro Devices ( AMD ) takes a lot of additional work, and

Hugging Face on Wednesday released a paid offering called HUGS,

short for Hugging Face for Generative AI Services, that takes

care of that work automatically.

Hugging Face will offer the product through Amazon ( AMZN ) and

Google's cloud computing services for $1 per hour and on Digital

Ocean, a specialty cloud computing company. Companies will also

be able to download the Hugging Face offering to run in their

own data centers.

The offering's primary competition is the commercial

services offered by companies such as OpenAI and Google-backed

Anthropic AI.

Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face,

said the offering is meant to help companies get control of both

the costs of their AI efforts and keep their data private, which

is a major concern in industries such as finance and healthcare

with strict rules around customer data.

"We're living in this anomaly where the norm has been to

outsource your AI technology to third parties and black box

systems," Boudier told Reuters. "Whereas for as long as we've

had tech industry, companies have wanted to build their own

technology and understand and control their own technology. What

we're trying to do is to make it as easy for a company to build

their AI using the best open models available."