Hugging Face has collected $235 million in an investment round that includes contributions from Amazon, IBM, Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. The New York-based startup creates and distributes open-source tools for artificial intelligence development, carving an AI-centric niche similar to the more general programming approach taken by the Microsoft-owned GitHub. The incoming cash infusion — earmarked for talent recruitment — gives Hugging Face a lofty $4.5 billion valuation that experts say indicates momentum for open source in what has to date been a highly competitive AI sector.

“Other highly valued AI startups, like OpenAI or Cohere, work on the technology directly and guard the results as a trade secret, then charge customers to access them through APIs,” writes CNBC.

“Hugging Face’s big valuation and crop of prominent backers reflect how a more collaborative approach to building AI has been gaining steam in recent months, especially after Facebook parent Meta released its Llama large language model, which is free to use for the vast majority of companies.”

Hugging Face offers a platform where AI developers share code, datasets, models and more, and access the the company’s open-source developer tools to get AI models up and running. “In particular, Hugging Face often hosts weights, or large files with lists of numbers, which are the heart of most modern AI models,” CNBC notes.

“While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their weights,” CNBC reports. It also produces software libraries that can help get models operational quickly, cleaning up  large datasets and providing evaluative performance analysis. It also does some AI hosting using a web interface.

The seven-year-old startup “now has over a million repositories, up from 300,000 earlier this year,” which includes “500,000 models, 250,000 datasets and 250,000 spaces,” according to VentureBeat,

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told VentureBeat it’s the first time he’s witnessed so many major tech firms uniting in a single funding round, indicating “broad support” for open-source AI, as well as a leadership position for Hugging Face in the machine learning community.

“Delangue also emphasized that the new funding round has ‘no strings attached, no commitment,’ which he said was ‘really important to us,’” VentureBeat writes.

Related:
Nvidia and Hugging Face to Connect Millions of Developers to Generative AI Supercomputing, Press Release, 8/8/23
Hugging Face Rallies Open-Source AI Community at Meetup, ETCentric, 4/6/23