Originally created to be an open domain conversational AI, your own ‘artificial BFF' that you could chat with when your real friends weren’t available — fast forward six years, and Hugging Face is the leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) start-up. The company is currently valued at $2B with over 10,000 companies using the open-source AI platform - including Bing, Apple, and Monzo.

Our guest, Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, believes in the sustainable long-term benefits of open-science and open-source collaboration and has built a community that fosters this goal. And while Hugging Face was initially mainly aimed at NLP, as of recent, it’s expanding to machine learning more generally, including computer vision and reinforcement learning.


WHAT’S IN THIS EPISODE:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:04 - Transition from Software 1.0 to Software 2.0 with ML
00:05:40 - Widespread adoption of open source collaboration
00:08:43 - Why 10,000+ companies use Hugging Face
00:12:01 - The NLP advancement driven by open science and open source
00:16:25 - Transferred learning benefits and efficiency
00:20:21 - Hugging Face’s start as a conversational AI
00:25:25 - Turning point with “Attention is All you Need”
00:29:10 - Clement’s vision for the future of transfer learning
00:34:33 - Reinforcement learning, speech and computer vision models
00:38:48 - Scaling the Hugging Face team
00:43:25 - The investors behind $100M Series C
00:49:15 Clement’s perspective on open source collaboration
00:52:16 - The NBA’s Kevin Durant’s investment in Hugging Face
00:56:26 - Value inspired processes when building machine learning

Links:
Hugging Face’s Website: https://huggingface.co/
Hugging Face’s Twitter:   / huggingface  
Clement’s Twitter:   / clementdelangue  
Big Science Collaboration: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/
Hugging Face’s $2B Valuation: https://tcrn.ch/3wFlWqV
Hugging Face on Forbes AI Top 50: https://bit.ly/3yVkZMz
How transformers work: https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1/4

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Host: Pieter Abbeel
Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones
Production: Fresh Air Production