Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a company and online platform for machine learning. Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf founded it in 2016 in New York. It started as a chatbot app for teenagers and shifted toward open tools for language models.

The Hugging Face Hub hosts a huge number of models, datasets and demo apps that people share publicly or privately. Each entry works like a code repository, with version history and documentation. Researchers and companies use it to find and publish models.

The Transformers library is one of its best known open source projects, and it makes pretrained models easy to load in Python. The company also maintains libraries for datasets, tokenizers and training. Paid products include Inference Endpoints and Spaces hosting, along with enterprise plans. Offices are in New York and Paris. The company is funded by venture investors and has partnerships with Amazon, Google and Nvidia. It runs research projects, including BigScience, which produced the open BLOOM model. Hugging Face has a strong community of contributors from many countries.