Hugging Face investors are driving a new wave of collaboration between hyperscalers and AI vendors.
Hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are partnering with AI vendors like Hugging Face to create more powerful and efficient AI models.
These partnerships are enabling the development of more advanced AI applications, such as natural language processing and computer vision.
For example, Hugging Face's transformer model is being used by these hyperscalers to improve their cloud-based AI services.
As a result, AI vendors like Hugging Face are gaining access to the resources and expertise of these hyperscalers, allowing them to create more sophisticated AI models.
This collaboration is also driving innovation in the field of AI, with new applications and use cases being developed all the time.
Hugging Face Investment
Hugging Face has secured a significant investment with broad support from major cloud and hardware companies.
Delangue, the company's representative, emphasized that the investment has "no strings attached, no commitment", which is a crucial aspect for them.
The company now has over a million repositories, up from 300,000 earlier this year, including 500,000 models, 250,000 datasets, and 250,000 spaces.
Salesforce has been intensifying its open-source AI efforts and has been increasing its presence on Hugging Face.
The investment is a validation of open-source AI and Hugging Face's central role in the AI community.
This investment round is notable for its broad support from major companies, making it clear how central Hugging Face has become.
Hugging Face hadn't planned to raise money right now, but external interest led them to believe it was a good time to double down.
The company reached out yearly milestones just before summer, exceeding their anticipated pace.
Why Invest in Hugging Face
Hugging Face is a platform that allows developers to upload and share their models and projects, making it a great place to collaborate and showcase work.
The platform offers a collection of software tools, or libraries, that users can utilize to accelerate their work, including evaluating model performance and cleaning up selected data sets.
Hugging Face's open-source code and free resources make it a straightforward way for developers to evaluate ML projects and build demos for LLM and other AI-focused projects.
This platform is also accessible at no cost, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to integrate AI development into their projects.
With the ability to create and deploy ML demos quickly, Spaces allows users to demonstrate and showcase projects, and Classrooms enables students and teachers to work together on models, datasets, and demos.
The commercial side of Hugging Face offers compute and storage locally, or integration with Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS, providing users with flexibility and options.
Hugging Face's investment from large enterprise vendors, such as Salesforce, is a testament to the platform's value and potential.
The investment makes sense, given the expensive nature of AI work and the growing demand for AI solutions.
As Todd R. Weiss from The Futurum Group noted, there will be more companies like Salesforce looking to get involved in the AI space, and Hugging Face is a great partner to have.
Enterprise Investment in AI
Enterprise Investment in AI is on the rise, and it's not just a trend. Large enterprise vendors are increasingly investing in AI startups.
Companies like Salesforce are joining the likes of Microsoft, which has made three rounds of investments in OpenAI since 2019. This investment makes sense, given the expensive nature of AI research and development.
The demand for AI is only growing, and companies are looking to get involved in this space. In fact, analyst Todd R. Weiss notes that he doesn't see this trend waning anytime soon.
Hugging Face, a popular open-source AI platform, has just raised a significant amount of funding. This is a good validation for open-source AI, but it's not the only reason for the investment.
Sources
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/07/13/ai-startup-hugging-face-raising-funds-4-billion-valuation/
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/hugging-face-raises-235m-from-investors-including-salesforce-and-nvidia/
- https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/machine-learning/article/33011679/hugging-face-gets-hyperscalers-and-ai-vendors-to-work-and-invest-together
- https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/hugging_face_big_tech_investment/
- https://venturebeat.com/ai/hugging-face-gets-a-235m-group-hug-led-by-salesforce/
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