Hugging Face

Last updated
Hugging Face, Inc.
Company type Private
Industry Artificial intelligence
Machine learning
Software development
Founded2016;9 years ago (2016)
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York City
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Clément Delangue (CEO)
  • Julien Chaumond (CTO)
  • Thomas Wolf (CSO)
ProductsModels, datasets, spaces,
learn, inference, libraries
RevenueIncrease2.svgUS$15 million (2022)
Number of employees
250 [1]  (2025)
Website huggingface.co

Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform allows users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work.

Contents

History

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. 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.

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. [3] In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. [4] [5]

Clement Delangue in 2023 Clement Delangue on SiliconANGLE theCUBE.jpg
Clément Delangue in 2023

In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow Hugging Face's products to be 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. [6] [7] [8]

Thomas Wolf in 2024 Thomas Wolf at Slush 2024.jpg
Thomas Wolf in 2024

In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. This initiative aims to help startups integrate open foundation models into their products, accelerating the EU AI ecosystem. The program, based at STATION F in Paris, will run from September 2024 to February 2025. Selected startups were to receive mentoring, access to AI models and tools, and Scaleway’s computing power. [9]

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. [10] It was built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages. [11]

On April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics. Pollen Robotics is a France based Robotics Startup founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016. [12] [13] In an X tweet, Delangue shared his vision to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source". [14]

Gradio UI example HiDream-E1-Full with Gradio screenshot.webp
Gradio UI example

See also

References

  1. ↑ Palazzolo, Stephanie (February 5, 2025). "Hugging Face Lays Off 4% of Staff" . The Information .
  2. ↑ "Hugging Face wants to become your artificial BFF". TechCrunch. March 9, 2017. Archived from the original on September 25, 2022. Retrieved September 17, 2023.
  3. ↑ "Inside BigScience, the quest to build a powerful open language model". VentureBeat. January 10, 2022. Archived from the original on July 1, 2022. Retrieved August 5, 2022.
  4. ↑ "BLOOM". bigscience.huggingface.co. Archived from the original on November 14, 2022. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Inside a radical new project to democratize AI". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on December 4, 2022. Retrieved August 25, 2023.
  6. ↑ Bass, Dina (February 21, 2023). "Amazon's Cloud Unit Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up". Bloomberg News . Archived from the original on May 22, 2023. Retrieved February 22, 2023.
  7. ↑ Nellis, Stephen (February 21, 2023). "Amazon Web Services pairs with Hugging Face to target AI developers". Reuters. Archived from the original on May 30, 2023. Retrieved February 22, 2023.
  8. ↑ "AWS and Hugging Face collaborate to make generative AI more accessible and cost efficient | AWS Machine Learning Blog". aws.amazon.com. February 21, 2023. Archived from the original on August 25, 2023. Retrieved August 25, 2023.
  9. ↑ "META Collaboration Launches AI Accelerator for European Startups". Yahoo Finance. June 25, 2024. Archived from the original on July 11, 2024. Retrieved July 11, 2024.
  10. ↑ "Hugging Face Spaces Translator". September 23, 2024.
  11. ↑ "UNESCO Translator Event". September 23, 2024.
  12. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (April 14, 2025). "Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup". TechCrunch. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
  13. ↑ Koetsier, John. "Open Source Humanoid Robots That You Can 3D Print Yourself: Hugging Face Buys Pollen Robotics". Forbes. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
  14. ↑ Knight, Will. "An Open Source Pioneer Wants to Unleash Open Source AI Robots". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved April 15, 2025.
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