Collaborative hub for developing and sharing open-source machine learning models
Exploring an interesting piece of internal tech: Co-founder spent weekend building out a piece of tech he thought was interesting; launched it and saw immediate interest.
AI Tamagotchi
Lukewarm interest
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-become-your-artificial-bff/ https://www.youtube.com/live/AxQgh_rKoOk?si=k5NbyYiKcH7vdOg6&t=100
“Thomas Wolf, one of our co-founders, I think it was like a Friday night, was like, I’ve seen this thing called Birds that was released by Google, but it kind of sucks because it’s on TensorFlow. I think I’m going to spend the weekend porting that into Pytorch. And we’re like, yeah, you do. You have fun. Have fun during your weekends. And on Monday he came back and it’s like, okay, I’m going to release it. And he released it on GitHub, tweeted about it. And we got like a thousand likes, which for us at the time—we were, like, nobodies. We're like, what’s happening? Why are people liking this very specific, very niche, very kind of technical tweet about the Pytorch port of Bird? There’s something there. So we kept kind of like exploring that. We joined them, started to add other models to the GitHub repository. And the community came together. People started to fix bugs for us in the repository. We’re like, Why are people doing that? They started adding models. They started, for example, the first GPT. They added the next models that were released, and really fast. We ended up with one of the most popular GitHub repository for AI. And that’s kind of like what transitioned us from this first idea to where we are now.” —Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO
2.5 years
One piece of tech