Democratizing AI: The Hugging Face Ethos of Accessible Machine Learning

This is our fourth Corporate Chronicle (#1 OpenAI, #2 Anthropic, #3 Inflection) focusing on generative AI unicorns. We initially planned to spotlight Cohere, but Hugging Face disrupted the narrative. Because of that, the publication is hitting your inbox on Saturday instead of Friday, our apologies.

In August 2023, Hugging Face secured $235 million in a Series D round, boasting a valuation of $4.5 billion. It surged ahead, not just of Cohere but surpassing Inflection, with its ~$4.0 billion valuation.

In emoji terms, all we can say is this 👏 

According to our own Twitter sentiment analysis, Hugging Face is a widely admired player in both ML and AI. Everybody seems to love them.

• How did they achieve it?

• What makes this light-looking company such a heavyweight?

• Who are the people behind it, and what is their vision? What did they build?

• Are they responsible for the AI they work on? Are they reliable?

• How do they plan to make money? etc

We'll answer these questions and more in our exploration of Hugging Face. Tune in.

1. The starting point of the company

2. Mission of the company and its founders

3. Groundbreaking Initiatives

4. The tech behind their most famous products

5. Current situation including finances

6. How the company is going to make money?

7. Founders’ attitude toward AI risks

8. Regulations

9. Bonus: All important links about the founders

The starting point of the company

“I’m French, as you can hear from my accent, and moved to the US 10 years ago, barely speaking English,” said Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO at Hugging Face, in his testimony to the US House of Representatives in June 2023. He was working for a startup called ‘Mention’ then, in 2013, that was acquired by ‘Mynewsdesk’ in 2014. He was CMO with a passion for sharing knowledge and building communities with maximum openness (Check this spotlight story from Sequoia Capital if you want to learn about Delangue’s childhood.)

In 2015, he and his long-term friend Julien Chaumond decided to enroll in a computer science class created by Richard Socher. Recently, Richard tweeted:

In 2015, though, they were building a chatbot designed to be a fun companion for teenagers. If you remember 2015, Conversational AI was not yet well-developed. Their attempt was gutsy. The three founders – Thomas Wolf, who knew Julien from École Polytechnique and was also part of the Stanford learning group – dug deep into natural language processing (NLP) to bring their whimsically-faced chatbot to life. In 2016, Hugging Face was launched. With scientific credibility backed by Richard Socher, they raised $1.2 million in 2017 from SV Angel, Betaworks, and NBA star Kevin. "We really have this vision where we believe everyone will have an AI friend and interact daily with Hugging Face," Delangue said. If only he knew that with almost the same objective, a company called Inflection would raise over $1.5 billion in 2023... But in 2016-2017, to power their bot, three founders had to explore every inch of the NLP universe.

Making their own research public was just natural for them. “Sharing knowledge benefits everybody” was part of their attitude towards business.

2017 changed everything in NLP – a transformative year punctuated by the unveiling of 'transformers,' a novel architecture conceived by researchers from Google and the University of Toronto and explained in their infamous paper “Attention is All You Need.” Transformers provided the scaffolding for formidable language models like BERT, ROBERTa, and GPT-3, all of which had the innate ability to understand the intricacies of language at a blistering speed, courtesy of parallel GPU processing.

These models were monumental but also monumental-ly inaccessible to the average Joe Developer. Working on their chatbot, Hugging Face developed an open-source transformers library, putting the power of cutting-edge NLP into the hands of developers regardless of their Silicon Valley pedigree. The game-changer, however, came when Hugging Face simplified Google's BERT model, refactoring it into PyTorch, and—gasp—open-sourced it.

Mission of the company and its founders

From this moment their mission crystallized from being mere chatbot developers to evangelists of accessible machine learning. "It just seemed to be something a lot of people would like to use," Delangue remarked, his words betraying a nonchalant profundity. And so, the mission was redefined: Hugging Face would be a sanctuary for machine learning enthusiasts, whether engineers, researchers, or tinkerers at a weekend hackathon. Since then they aimed to become the GitHub of machine learning.

This pivot ushered in an era of symbiotic cross-pollination within the community. Now Hugging Face wasn't just a tool; it was a movement, a pulsating hub of ingenuity. And just like that, a company transformed itself by transforming the very way we access and leverage machine learning. It's a fascinating narrative of how a change in mission can make not just a company, but an entire community, punch above its weight.

And when they now say it’s the fastest-growing community and most used platform for machine learning – it’s actually true.

In an interview in March, 2021 Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond said that the democratization of AI will be one of the biggest achievements for society. He added that no single company, not even a Big Tech business, can do it alone.

Their official mission from the website states:

Groundbreaking Initiatives