AI startup Hugging Face reaches one million downloadable AI models – that’s a lot you have never heard of
The AI hosting platform Hugging Face surpassed one million AI models on Thursday (September 26), showing exponential interest in the field of machine learning.
Launched in 2016 as a chatbot app, Hugging Face then turned its attention to becoming an open-source hub for AI models in 2020.
The community-focused model provides AI and ML researchers with access to curated datasets, machine learning models, and AI-powered demo apps.
On its website, the company describes itself as being the “platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications.”
After reaching the milestone, the Co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue took to X (formerly Twitter) to share the news and to cheer those involved.
We just crossed 1,000,000 free public models on Hugging Face!
That’s the ones the media covers like Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Phi, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi but also 999,984 others. Why?
Because contrary…
— clem (@ClementDelangue) September 26, 2024
“We just crossed 1,000,000 free public models on Hugging Face!
“That’s the ones the media covers like Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Phi, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi but also 999,984 others. Why?
“Because contrary to the “1 model to rule them all” fallacy, smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware, and generally your constraints are better.”
Milestone hit just months after CEO said Hugging Face is profitable
The AI startup CEO goes on to explain how “there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization – for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use cases.”
A new repository, either a model, dataset, or space, is now created every 10 seconds on the platform. Delangue says “There’s going to be as many models as code repositories and we’ll be here for it! Cheers to the community!”
This isn’t a goal of ours because we have plenty of money in the bank but quite excited to see that @huggingface is profitable these days, with 220 team members and most of our platform being free (like model hosting) and open-source for the community!
Especially noteworthy at…
— clem (@ClementDelangue) July 12, 2024
The most recent success has come just two months after the CEO shared that he’s “excited to see that Hugging Face is profitable these days,” with 220 team members working behind the scenes.
Most of the platform is free for its users and is open-source. He described this profitability as being “especially noteworthy at a time when most AI startups wouldn’t survive a year or two without VC money. Great job team!”
Featured Image: via Hugging Face on X
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