Hugging Face

Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets. The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. After open-sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning. In March 2021, Hugging Face raised $40 million in a Series B funding round. On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model. In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. On December 21, 2021, the company announced its acquisition of Gradio, a software library used to make interactive browser demos of machine learning models. On May 5, 2022, the company announced its Series C funding round led by Coatue and Sequoia. The company received a$2 billion valuation. On May 13, 2022, the company introduced its Student Ambassador Program to help fulfill its mission to teach machine learning to 5 million people by 2023. On May 26, 2022, the company announced a partnership with Graphcore to optimize its Transformers library for the Graphcore IPU. On August 3, 2022, the company announced the Private Hub, an enterprise version of its public Hugging Face Hub that supports SaaS or on-premises deployment. In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow Hugging Face's products available to AWS customers to use them as the building blocks for their custom applications. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS.