Hugging Face
The website where people share AI models and datasets, and the tools to use them.
Hugging Face is a company founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs, Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. It started as a chatbot app for teenagers, named after the hugging face emoji, and changed course when the open-source code it wrote for its own AI models became popular with researchers.
Its best-known piece is the Hub, a website that works like a GitHub for AI. Anyone can upload a model, a dataset or a small demo app (called a Space), and anyone can download them. Most open-weight models, from large companies and from individuals, are published there. Each model has a page that explains what it does, its license and how to use it, and in many cases you can try it right in the browser.
It also maintains popular open-source libraries, above all transformers, which lets a programmer load and run thousands of different models with a few lines of Python. Most of the Hub is free; Hugging Face makes money from paid plans for individuals and companies, private and enterprise features, and computing services that run models for customers without them having to manage servers.
Keep in mind
- Founded in 2016 in New York by three French entrepreneurs; named after the 🤗 emoji.
- The Hub hosts models, datasets and demo apps called Spaces.
- Its open-source library
transformersis a standard way to run models in Python. - Free for most uses; earns money from paid plans, enterprise features and hosted computing.
