Hugging Face

Profile Overview

Hugging Face is an artificial intelligence community and developer platform founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delanghe, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Originally started as a chatbot app for teenagers, the company pivoted in 2019 to focus on open-source machine learning tools. Today, Hugging Face is the central hub for the global open-source AI ecosystem, often described as the "GitHub of AI." The platform hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source models, datasets, and web applications (known as Spaces), allowing researchers and developers to easily collaborate, share, and test machine learning models. Hugging Face developed the Transformers library, which is the industry-standard framework for building and training modern NLP, computer vision, and audio models. The company also offers enterprise services, including secure model hosting, serverless inference, and hardware-accelerated training. Hugging Face is a strong advocate for open-science and ethical AI, hosting projects like BigScience which created the BLOOM multilingual model. In August 2023, Hugging Face secured $235 million in a Series D funding round from major tech firms including Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and Intel, valuing the platform at $4.5 billion. Hugging Face remains the primary infrastructure supporting open-weights AI development globally.

Flagship Offerings

Vetted AI Models