French-American start-up Hugging Face, which offers an open source collaborative artificial intelligence (AI) modeling platform, announced on Thursday a $235 million fundraiser from US technology giants such as Google, Amazon and Nvidia.
With this operation, Hugging Face, a young subsidiary created by the French and destined to be financed in the United States, is valued at 4.5 billion dollars, said its director and co-founder, Clément Delangue. That’s double what it was after its $100 million fundraiser in 2022.
The American groups (Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM and the Sound Ventures fund) participating in this round of financing use more than a thousand models available on the Hugging Face platform, which offers 500,000.
“Unprecedented in the industry”
This new fundraising will allow you to expand your team (currently 170 people, including 80 in France) and enrich your platform.
Business users (about 10,000) can take the models offered on the Hugging Face platform and adapt them to their needs, then share their version with the community. Hugging Face is also home to 200,000 data sets, also shared by the community. This offers users open source alternatives to proprietary models like ChatGPT (Open AI).
“Soon they will reach the same level of sophistication,” according to Julien Chaumond, for whom open source models take precedence over private ones. Meta has “open sourced” its Llama model on the Hugging Face platform.
Source: BFM TV
