A cohort of Big Tech firms has recently invested a total of $235 million in AI startup Hugging Face, a business that issues tools for AI developers to share and experiment with their work, akin to GitHub for programming projects. Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm all provided funds.The organization has obviously adopted its moniker after the hugging face emoji – a smiley enclosed by two outstretched arms – and evolved from a chatbot app for iPhone.
Hugging Face, a New York-based AI company, recently attained $235 million in funding from prominent tech firms such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm. This amount provides the company with a $4.5 billion valuation. CEO Clement Delangue plans to use the proceeds to recruit talent and stay competitive in the AI arena. The current AI boom, set off by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, has seen an influx of big business and venture capital, which has led to high company valuations.
Different from firms like OpenAI and Cohere, whose technology is kept secret and accessible via APIs to customers, Hugging Face provides a platform where AI developers can metabolize, share, and access open-source AI models, code, and datasets. It also features numerous development tools that help users get the models operational more quickly and evaluate their performance. This approach has been gaining prominence over the recent months, especially after Facebook parent Meta unveiled its Llama large language model, which is free to use for most companies.
Much like GitHub, the consolidated code-repository website which Microsoft purchased in 2018, Hugging Face is being used heavily by engineers. Delangue believes this platform will be widely utilized in the future and anticipates that in five years, there will be more than one hundred million AI builders daily accessing Hugging Face.
The company's website hosts 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 datasets, and currently has 10,000 paying customers. These models cover a range of applications such as language translation, music generation, imagery analysis, and more. Delangue himself demonstrated some of these models - such as IDEFICS, Seamless M4T, and Llama2 - in a recent interview with CNBC.
The company Hugging Face is named after the hugging face emoji, a smiley face surrounded by two open hands. This name and logo date back to the company's beginnings. Initially, Hugging Face was an iPhone chatbot app, but after open-sourcing some of its machine-learning code, it was picked up by AI developers and subsequently the company pivoted to this new direction. Co-founder Stanislav Delangue jokingly said, "When we started the company, with my cofounders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, we joked that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter ticker. Maybe during this round we should start our lobbying exercise with the Nasdaq for them to allow us to use emojis on their board."
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