Clément Delangue

FOR TURNING AI INTO A COMMUNITY EFFORT

LLAST MARCH, when Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue was planning to visit San Francisco, he tweeted that he was thinking about organizing an open-source AI meetup there. His offhand idea blossomed into a festival that was instantly dubbed the “Woodstock of AI,” as more than 4,000 techies converged to show off their work and bond with kindred spirits.

The gathering was a real-world manifestation of the community Delangue has created as CEO of Hugging Face. Founded in 2016 and based in Brooklyn, the company had originally built a chatbot aimed at teenagers (hence its quirky moniker, borrowed from an emoji of the same name). But as Delangue and cofounders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf delved into the AI necessary to power their bot, they started sharing their research—and the reaction was so enthusiastic that it redefined the startup’s mission “organically and progressively,” Delangue explains.

Now the chatbot is history, and Hugging Face has morphed into a Github-like haven for open-source AI. Anyone can use it to host machine learning projects, which can then become available for others to contribute to, remix for their own projects, or simply learn from. Users have shared more than 250,000 models and 50,000 data sets to date, helping propel the company to a $2 billion valuation. (Along with hosting models and data for free, it offers paid Pro accounts and other fee-based AI services.)

As generative AI has reached an inflection point, this open approach to innovation has become a crucial alternative to the more proprietary, often secretive progress being made by a handful of high-profile companies. Yet even as Delangue competes with the AI behemoths, he’s also deftly collaborating with them. In May 2022, Hugging Face announced a deal that allows anyone to run its models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, giving AI engineers an easy way to deploy software and Microsoft a new revenue stream. Similar partnerships with Amazon Web Services and IBM have followed.

Like any good leader of a growing movement, Delangue is quick to deflect credit. “When we started Hugging Face, we were random French guys in the U.S.,” he says of himself and his cofounders, who met in Paris. (He now lives in the U.S.) “We’d be nowhere close to where we are if it wasn’t for open-source contributors and researchers sharing the models.” True enough—but without Hugging Face, all those enterprising, generous souls would have a far harder time finding each other. And as AI continues to reshape every aspect of software— and life—delangue’s community is poised to grow much, much larger.