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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence Machine learning Software development |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Headquarters | |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | Models, datasets, spaces |
| Revenue |  US$15 million (2022) |
Number of employees | 250 [1] (2024) |
| Website | huggingface |
Hugging Face is a French-American company that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. It is known for its transformers library built for natural language processing applications.
The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. [2] The company was named after the U+1F917🤗HUGGING FACE emoji. [2] 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 US$40 million in a Series B funding round. [3]
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. [4] In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. [5] [6]
In December 2022, the company acquired Gradio, an open source library built for developing machine learning applications in Python. [7]
On May 5, 2022, the company announced its Series C funding round led by Coatue and Sequoia. [8] The company received a $2 billion valuation.
In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow AWS customers access to Hugging Face's products. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS. [9] [10] [11]
In August 2023, the company announced that it raised $235 million in a Series D funding, at a $4.5 billion valuation. The funding was led by Salesforce, and notable participation came from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm. [12]
In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. [13]
On September 23, 2024, to further the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Hugging Face teamed up with Meta and UNESCO to launch a new online language translator [14] built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages. [15]
The Transformers library is a Python package that contains open-source implementations of transformer models for text, image, and audio tasks. It is compatible with the PyTorch, TensorFlow and JAX deep learning libraries and includes implementations of notable models like BERT and GPT-2. [16] The library was originally called "pytorch-pretrained-bert" [17] which was then renamed to "pytorch-transformers" and finally "transformers."
A JavaScript version (transformers.js [18] ) has also been developed, allowing models to be run directly in the browser.
The Hugging Face Hub is a platform (centralized web service) for hosting: [19]
There are numerous pre-trained models that support common tasks in different modalities, such as:
In addition to Transformers and the Hugging Face Hub, the Hugging Face ecosystem contains libraries for other tasks, such as dataset processing ("Datasets"), model evaluation ("Evaluate"), and machine learning demos ("Gradio"). [20]
The safetensors format was developed around 2021 to solve problems with using Python's pickle format (that was then used in PyTorch). It was designed for saving and loading tensors. Compared to pickle format, it allows lazy loading, and avoids security problems. [21] After a security audit, it became the default format in 2023. [22]
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