Hugging Face logo

Hugging Face

huggingface.co

Hugging Face

Origin

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York City by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. The company initially started as a chatbot for teenagers before pivoting to become a machine learning platform.

History

Originally launched as a chatbot company, Hugging Face transitioned in 2018 to focus on natural language processing and open-source machine learning tools. The company gained significant traction with the release of the Transformers library in 2019, which became the de facto standard for working with transformer models. In 2021, Hugging Face raised $40 million in Series B funding, followed by a $100 million Series C round in 2022, reaching a $2 billion valuation.

Mission

To democratize artificial intelligence by making machine learning accessible to everyone through open-source tools, collaborative platforms, and educational resources.

Vision

To build the future of AI together by creating an open platform where the machine learning community can collaborate, share, and build upon each other's work.

Values

  • Open Source: Committed to open-source development and transparency
  • Community: Building and supporting a collaborative global community
  • Democratization: Making AI accessible to everyone regardless of background
  • Innovation: Pushing the boundaries of what's possible with machine learning
  • Responsibility: Promoting ethical AI development and deployment

Products and Services

Hugging Face offers a comprehensive ecosystem including the Transformers library, Datasets library, Tokenizers, the Hub platform for model sharing, Spaces for ML demos, AutoTrain for automated model training, and enterprise solutions through Hugging Face Enterprise Hub.

Latest Technologies and Trends

The company is at the forefront of transformer architectures, multimodal AI, efficient model training techniques, and responsible AI development. They actively contribute to cutting-edge research in areas like few-shot learning, model optimization, and AI safety.

Curiosities

Hugging Face's name and emoji-based branding reflect their mission to make AI more human and approachable. The company has become synonymous with the democratization of AI, often referred to as the 'GitHub of machine learning'.

Products by this company

AutoTrain logo huggingface.co

AutoTrain

AutoTrain is a no-code platform for automatically training state-of-the-art machine learning models on custom datasets without requiring ML expertise.

Hugging Face Hub logo huggingface.co

Hugging Face Hub

Hugging Face Hub is the central platform for hosting, sharing, and collaborating on machine learning models, datasets, and demos. It serves as the largest repository of open-source AI models.

Hugging Face Inference API logo huggingface.co

Hugging Face Inference API

Inference API provides fast, reliable, and scalable access to thousands of machine learning models through a simple REST API, without managing infrastructure.

Hugging Face Spaces logo huggingface.co

Hugging Face Spaces

Spaces is a platform for hosting machine learning demos and applications, supporting frameworks like Gradio and Streamlit for easy deployment and sharing.

Transformers Library logo huggingface.co

Transformers Library

Transformers is the most popular Python library for state-of-the-art machine learning models, providing thousands of pretrained models for NLP, computer vision, and audio tasks.