# Hugging Face

> The website where people share AI models and datasets, and the tools to use them.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, AI
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/hugging-face/
- In Spanish: [Hugging Face](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/hugging-face/)

**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.

## An analogy

A big public library for AI, where anyone can donate a book, borrow one for free, or sit in the reading room and try it out, and the library charges only for private rooms and extra services.

## 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 `transformers` is a standard way to run models in Python.
- Free for most uses; earns money from paid plans, enterprise features and hosted computing.

## Go deeper

- [Hugging Face Hub documentation](https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/index)
- [Hugging Face on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face)

## Related terms

- [Chatbot](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/chatbot/): A program you talk to by typing or speaking, as if it were a person.
- [Emoji](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/emoji/): Little pictures that are really text characters, drawn differently by each phone maker.
- [Open source](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/open-source/): Software whose code anyone can read, use, change and share.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [GitHub](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/github/): A website where teams store their code with Git and work on it together.
- [Open-weights models](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/open-weights-models/): AI models whose trained numbers anyone can download and run on their own machines.
- [Web browser](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/web-browser/): The app that fetches web pages from the internet and draws them on your screen.
- [Python](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/python/): A popular programming language known for being easy to read and quick to write.