Google teams up with Hugging Face ‘to make generative AI more accessible’

Google Cloud and Hugging Face have joined forces to help the development of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The collaboration will promote Hugging Face’s pledge to make AI more accessible and enhance Alphabet-owned Google Cloud’s backing of the opensource AI ecosystem’s growth, they said.

Under the agreement, developers will be able to build, train and use AI models without needing a Google Cloud subscription, offering a more accessible pathway to advanced AI development.

Set up in 2016, French-American company Hugging Face is a collaboration platform for the global machine-learning community. It develops tools for building applications using AI and machine learning.

The partnership intends to make generative AI “more accessible and impactful for developers”, said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud.

It will ensure developers on Hugging Face will have access to Google Cloud’s “purpose-built AI platform … along with our secure infrastructure, which can accelerate the next generation of AI services and applications”.

“Google has been at the forefront of AI progress and the open-science movement,” said Clement Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face.

“With this new partnership, we will make it easy for Hugging Face users and Google Cloud customers to leverage the latest open models together with leading optimised AI infrastructure and tools to meaningfully advance developers’ ability to build their own AI models.”

In August, Hugging Face teamed up with the US-based chip company Nvidia to connect developers with generative AI tools.

With customers in more than 200 countries and territories, Google Cloud includes the company’s infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools and other services for enterprise customers. It generates revenue mainly from fees received for cloud platform services and workspace collaboration tools.