Hugging Face’s $235M Vote of Confidence

Hugging Face introduced it has raised $235 million in a Collection D funding spherical led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from a bunch of tech giants together with IBM, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, in addition to Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures. The corporate is now valued at $4.5 billion.

Hugging Face is a developer neighborhood and platform with open supply AI and machine studying sources like fashions, datasets, ML demos, and libraries. The corporate claims it accelerates AI deployment by offering MLOps options together with custom-made assist, coaching, fine-tuning, deployment providers, APIs and extra.

One widespread useful resource is the Transformers library, a Python package deal containing open supply Transformer fashions for textual content, picture, and audio duties that’s appropriate with PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX deep studying libraries. The corporate additionally has a platform referred to as Hugging Face Hub that hosts Git-based code repositories, fashions, datasets, and functions.

The corporate was based in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf. Hugging Face initially purveyed a chatbot app for youngsters, marketed as an AI good friend that might entertain with its cheeky dialog. In 2018, Hugging Face launched an open supply model of PyTorch BERT, the conversational AI mannequin behind its chatbot, resulting in its renewed focus as a machine studying platform.

Hugging Face beforehand raised $100 million in a Collection C spherical led by Lux Capital in Might 2022: “At Hugging Face, we all know that Machine Studying has some necessary limitations and challenges that have to be tackled now like biases, privateness, and vitality consumption. With openness, transparency, and collaboration, we will foster accountable and inclusive progress, understanding, and accountability to mitigate these challenges,” the corporate mentioned in a blog post on the time.

The corporate will use the Collection D funds to extend its present 170-employee headcount and spend money on its expertise, in accordance with a Reuters report that additionally quoted CEO Delangue: “In 5 years, each tech firm shall be an AI firm.” One other report from The Info claims that Hugging Face might generate greater than $30 million in annual income.

(Supply: Twitter)

Open supply AI is an alternate growth paradigm to the closed supply, industrial AI that’s usually referred to as a black field as a result of nebulous nature of its coaching knowledge and configuration. Corporations usually maintain their proprietary code beneath wraps to maximise profitability, providing customers little alternative to see beneath the hood or extensively customise their fashions.

Proponents of open supply AI with its publicly obtainable code say it promotes transparency and community-driven enhancements, as anybody can examine, modify, and distribute the associated software program and frameworks.

Some firms like Meta are bridging the hole by releasing open supply variations of AI fashions like Llama-2, its 70 billion-parameter LLM skilled on two trillion tokens of uncooked textual content, hosted by Hugging Face. Stability AI’s Secure Diffusion mannequin is one other instance of an open supply mannequin hosted on the platform.

Collection D-backer IBM has contributed over 200 open fashions and datasets on Hugging Face, together with its latest Geospatial Basis Mannequin inbuilt collaboration with NASA. Moreover, IBM mentioned in a launch it has plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat mannequin inside its watsonx AI platform, saying it’ll additional the corporate’s technique of leveraging each third-party and proprietary AI fashions to keep up open innovation.

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