Build an AI chatbot with FastChat and JavaScript

Salesforce's recent survey highlights the growing adoption of chatbots, with 23 percent of service companies currently using them, and projections suggesting this figure will more than double in the next 18 months. FastChat emerges as a pivotal platform supporting this trend by offering an open-source solution for training, serving, and evaluating large language models that power chatbots. Its architecture allows for easy integration with existing applications using the OpenAI-compatible API, enabling developers to test and deploy various models without altering source code. The article discusses implementing a simple AI chatbot within a JavaScript web app using FastChat, leveraging models like google/flan-t5-large to interact on standard hardware. FastChat's infrastructure, which includes components like controllers and model workers, supports flexible deployment, utilizing Gradio for web interfaces, and allowing for scalable and expandable AI solutions suitable for diverse applications.