The GitHub of machine learning Comes of Age

Hugging Face raised $235 million in a Series D funding round. The GitHub for Machine Learning company is only getting more important in the Generative A.I. Era

Welcome,

Hugging Face has truly become an important company in recent years, especially in the open-source era of LLMs. It acts as a hub for AI experts and enthusiasts—like a GitHub for AI.

Hugging Face is trying to build the AI community building the future. I happen to think it’s doing a pretty good job. Many of its A.I. scientists are active now on Substack too, like

Interconnects

by Nathan Lambert.

A few days ago the Information in one of its scoops broke the Series D round, roughly $200 million funding round that more than doubles the share price and private valuation of the New York–based company. The lead is actually none other than Salesforce.

As wild as some of the internal valuations of A.I. startups are, I can accept Hugging Face at just over $4 Billion. The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.

If Hugging Face has come a long ways in an apparently short time, it’s also reflective of A.I.’s generational appeal in the since around 2015.

Hugging Face is a Powerhouse in its Utility for A.I. Practitioners

• Hugging Face offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications.

• It also provides libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.