The Hugging Face web site on a smartphone organized in New York, Aug. 17, 2023.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hugging Face, an AI agency primarily based in New York, has raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation from a few of expertise’s largest firms.
Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm all contributed to the spherical, the corporate stated. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue stated the funds are to be centered on hiring expertise to be aggressive within the synthetic intelligence area.
Startups engaged on AI fashions have reached excessive valuations as huge firms and enterprise capitalists search to plow cash within the latest AI increase, which kicked off final 12 months when Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot.
Hugging Face’s huge valuation and crop of distinguished backers replicate how a extra collaborative method to constructing AI has been gaining steam in latest months, particularly after Facebook mum or dad Meta launched its Llama massive language mannequin, which is free to make use of for the overwhelming majority of firms.
Other extremely valued AI startups, like OpenAI or Cohere, work on the expertise straight and guard the outcomes as a commerce secret, then cost clients to entry them by way of utility programming interfaces, or APIs.
But Hugging Face produces a platform the place AI builders can share code, fashions, information units, and use the corporate’s developer instruments to get open-source synthetic intelligence fashions operating extra simply. In specific, Hugging Face typically hosts weights, or massive recordsdata with lists of numbers, that are the center of most fashionable AI fashions.
While Hugging Face has developed some fashions, like BLOOM, its main product is its web site platform, the place customers can add fashions and their weights. It additionally develops a sequence of software program instruments known as libraries that enable customers to get fashions working rapidly, to scrub up massive datasets, or to guage their efficiency. It additionally hosts some AI fashions in an internet interface so finish customers can experiment with them.
It’s comparable in theme and observe to code-repository GitHub (which Microsoft acquired in 2018), the place coders from all over the world put up their initiatives whereas they’re engaged on them.
Hugging Face endorses the idea that almost all firms working with AI will wish to develop their very own fashions or expertise, and can want instruments to take action, co-founder and CEO Delangue informed CNBC. He hopes that AI builders will depend on Hugging Face every day to get their work achieved.
One purpose the large firms are investing: Their workers are actively utilizing the platform, he stated.
“AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day,” Delangue stated. He predicted that the variety of software program builders working with AI fashions would develop within the coming years.
“Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” he stated.
Although most consideration in latest weeks has been on so-called massive language fashions like ChatGPT or Llama that target producing textual content, Hugging Face hosts any AI mannequin, together with ones that generate music or photographs, translate languages, or determine objects inside photographs. Hugging Face hosts 500,000 totally different AI fashions, 250,000 information units, and has 10,000 paying clients, the corporate stated.
Delangue informed CNBC he had just lately performed with IDEFICS, which permits customers to add a picture and ask questions on it. He additionally talked about Seamless M4T, a translation mannequin from Facebook, in addition to Llama2, Facebook’s language mannequin.
What’s with the humorous identify?
Hugging Face is called after an emoji, the cuddling face, a smiley face framed by two open palms.
The identify and brand date again to the corporate’s founding. Hugging Face was initially a iPhone chatbot app, however when the corporate open-sourced some its machine-learning code, it realized that it was catching on with AI builders, and pivoted towards that.
“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,” Delangue stated.
“Maybe during this round we should start our lobbying exercise with the Nadsaq for them to allow us to use emojis on their board,” he quipped.
Source: www.cnbc.com