The Hugging Face website on a smartphone arranged in New York, Aug. 17, 2023.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hugging Face, an AI company based in New York, has secured $235 million in funding at a valuation of $4.5 billion, with support from some of the biggest names in the technology industry.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm have all participated in this funding round, according to Hugging Face’s CEO Clement Delangue. The company intends to use the funds to attract top talent and maintain a competitive position within the artificial intelligence landscape.
In recent times, startups focusing on AI models have seen significant valuations as major corporations and venture capitalists pour money into the thriving AI sector. This trend started last year when OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, released its ChatGPT chatbot.
Hugging Face’s impressive valuation and esteemed list of investors reflect the growing popularity of a collaborative approach to AI development. This has been particularly evident since Meta, the parent company of Facebook, introduced its Llama large language model, which is freely available to most businesses.
While other highly valued AI startups, such as OpenAI and Cohere, withhold their technological advancements as trade secrets, Hugging Face takes a different approach. The company offers a platform for AI developers to share code, models, and datasets, along with developer tools that facilitate the deployment of open-source AI models. Hugging Face is known for hosting weights, which are vital components of modern AI models that consist of large lists of numbers.
Hugging Face’s primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their corresponding weights. Additionally, the company has developed a range of software tools called libraries to enable users to quickly implement models, clean up large datasets, and evaluate performance. Furthermore, Hugging Face provides a web interface that allows end users to experiment with AI models.
This model of collaboration resembles GitHub, a code repository platform that was acquired by Microsoft in 2018. It serves as a hub for developers worldwide to share and collaborate on their projects.
Hugging Face’s CEO Delangue believes that most companies working with AI will want to develop their own models or technology, necessitating the availability of efficient tools. He hopes that AI developers will rely on Hugging Face’s platform on a daily basis to fulfill their requirements. The active usage of the platform by employees of major companies was cited as one of the reasons for their investments.
While recent attention has focused on large language models like ChatGPT and Llama, which excel at generating text, Hugging Face’s hosting capabilities extend to any type of AI model. This includes models for music or image generation, language translation, and object identification within images. In total, Hugging Face hosts 500,000 AI models and 250,000 datasets, and boasts 10,000 paying customers.
Delangue highlighted his experimentation with IDEFICS, an image-based question-answering model, as well as Seamless M4T from Facebook, which is a translation model, and Llama2, Facebook’s language model.
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