Hugging Face started as a chatbot startup but transformed into the central hub for NLP development. Its open-source library 'Transformers' made it easy to use powerful models with just a few lines of code.
It was founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City.
The current Hugging Face team includes experts in AI, NLP, and open-source development. Clément Delangue remains CEO, and Thomas Wolf is the Chief Science Officer.
Hugging Face raised funding from top venture capital firms such as Lux Capital, Addition, and Sequoia Capital. By 2023, it had raised over $235 million in funding.
Its key features include the Transformers library, Datasets hub, Spaces for hosting ML apps, and Inference API. These tools help researchers, developers, and organizations build and share machine learning models easily.
The platform now hosts thousands of models, datasets, and applications. Its community-driven ecosystem encourages collaboration and democratizes access to state-of-the-art AI tools.