Hugging Face Clément Delangue, CEO of , is against the practice of big tech companies retaining machine learning code like commercial patents. Instead,He is working to build a world where every developer or startup can freely accessAImodel and effectively help AI Open Source.
Today, Hugging Face is democratizing the development of the most impactful technology of our time. The platform serves over 50,000 organizations using its services, including over 300,000 models, 100,000 applications, and 50,000 datasets. Its approach stands in stark contrast to other AI developers who protect their proprietary technology and models.
“We need more companies and organizations to openly share their models and datasets in an open-source way so that everyone can understand and build AI,” he said.Delangue said in an interview.
Delangue co-founded Hugging Face in 2016, which was originally conceived as a chatbot for teenagers and later upgraded to natural language processing (NLP) technology. The platform later began to open source popular large-scale language models.I think with the open source model you can do things a little differently... as a startup you can empower the community in a way and create a thousand times more value than building a proprietary tool,” Delangue said in a 2021 interview.
This fall, a team of researchers at Stanford University published a report measuring how much information AI makers like OpenAI, Meta, and Google reveal about the construction of their models, declaring that the mostFamousDevelopers do not share enough information about their potential impact on society. Delangue said:This year, Hugging Face is striving to make this issue one of its signature achievements. "Another important achievement this year is advocating for more openness and transparency with policymakers,"Delangue said.
Delangue believes transparency is one of the reasons Hugging Face has become a widely used open platform for AI builders — its approach has attracted the attention of not only developers but other tech executives as well.Like his peers, Delangue has testified before lawmakers about AI. In June, at a hearing before the U.S. Congress, he stressed that the field of AI is dominated by a small number of wealthy companies that “provide limited or no open access to new AI systems based on open research.”
But even as Hugging Face criticizes big tech giants for keeping their AI tools secret, it has also found ways to work with them.Hugging Face's promotion attracted heavyweight investors including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Nvidia and Qualcomm. In August this year, its valuation reached $4.5 billion..
Hugging Face sees itself as a community building the future of AI development, and its platform has been compared to Github for AIIn 2024, Delangue has his eye on a growth milestone: 10 million users on the platform. As AI advances rapidly, Hugging Face is moving developers toward a community-like effort — one that drives systematic sharing, collaboration, and feedback.