Hugging Face, an AI startup based in New York, recently raised an impressive $235 million in a funding round led by some of the biggest names in the tech industry. Including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm. This significant investment highlights the growing interest and support for AI development and collaboration.
The company's name, Hugging Face, is derived from the hugging face emoji – a smiley face framed by two open hands. Initially, Hugging Face developed a chatbot app for iPhone before evolving into a platform that enables AI developers to openly share and test their work. The concept is similar to GitHub, which serves as a collaborative platform for programmers.
The AI industry has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, with startups focusing on AI models attracting high valuations. This trend is driven by both large companies and venture capitalists seeking opportunities in the AI boom. Last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, which played a significant role in kickstarting the AI revolution.
Hugging Face's substantial valuation and support from prominent backers demonstrate the increasing popularity of a collaborative approach to building AI. This shift can be attributed to Meta's release of Llama, a large language model available for free to most companies. Unlike other highly valued AI startups, such as OpenAI or Cohere, which guard their technology as trade secrets, Hugging Face provides a platform that encourages open-source sharing of code, models, and data sets.
The heart of most modern AI models lies in weights, which are large files containing lists of numbers. While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary focus is on providing a website platform where users can upload models and their weights. Additionally, the company offers software tools called libraries that facilitate quick implementation of models, dataset cleaning, and performance evaluation. Hugging Face also hosts some AI models on a web interface, allowing end users to experiment with them.
The platform's resemblance to GitHub is evident in its mission to support AI developers in creating their own models and technology. Co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue envisions Hugging Face becoming an essential tool for daily AI development tasks. The platform's popularity among employees from big tech companies who actively use it further validates its potential impact.
While recent attention has focused on large language models like ChatGPT and Llama, Hugging Face is inclusive of all AI models. This includes models that generate music or images, translate languages, or identify objects in images. With an impressive repository of 500,000 AI models and 250,000 data sets, and boasting 10,000 paying customers, Hugging Face has established itself as a go-to platform for AI developers.
In the coming years, Delangue predicts significant growth in the number of software developers working with AI models. He anticipates that the increasing demand for AI innovation will lead to around 100 million AI builders within five years. If Hugging Face continues to be the preferred choice for these developers, it will undoubtedly solidify its position as a leader in the AI collaboration space.
Hugging Face's journey, starting from a chatbot app to a prominent AI platform, is reflected in its unique and memorable name. The hugging face emoji and logo have remained consistent since its inception. Delangue even humorously suggests lobbying the Nasdaq to allow the use of emojis on their board.
With this recent investment, Hugging Face is poised to expand its team and hire top talent to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. As the company continues to facilitate collaboration and open-source sharing within the AI community, it has the potential to shape the future of AI development.
