Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company that develops tools for building applications using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. It is most notable for its Transformers library built for

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets.

History

The company was founded in 2016 by 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 democratizing machine learning. In March 2021, Hugging Face raised $40 million in a

Series B A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the ...

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 A language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given any sequence of words of length , a language model assigns a probability P(w_1,\ldots,w_m) to the whole sequence. Language models generate probabilities by training on ...

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 Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...

or on-premise deployment.

Services and technologies

Transformers Library

The Transformers library is a Python package that contains open-source implementations of

transformer A transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces a varying magnetic flux in the transformer' ...

models for text, image, and audio tasks. It is compatible with the

PyTorch PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is free and op ...

, TensorFlow and

JAX Jax may refer to: Places * Jax, Haute-Loire, France * Informal shorthand for Jacksonville, Florida, United States ** Jacksonville station, Amtrak station ** Jacksonville International Airport ** Naval Air Station Jacksonville People * Garth Ja ...

deep learning libraries and includes implementations of notable models like BERT and GPT.

Hugging Face Hub

The Hugging Face Hub is a platform where users can share pre-trained models, datasets, and demos of machine learning projects. The Hub contains

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

-inspired features for code-sharing and collaboration, including discussions and pull requests for projects. It also hosts Hugging Face Spaces, a hosted service that allows users to build web-based demos of machine learning apps using the Gradio or Streamlit.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hugging Face Machine learning Open-source artificial intelligence