Hugging Face
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Machine learning software |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Founder | Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf |
| Headquarters | New York City , United States |
| Products | Transformers library, machine learning model and dataset sharing platform |
Hugging Face, Inc. is an American firm headquartered in New York City that specializes in developing software tools for creating applications powered by machine learning. Its most notable offering is the transformers library, extensively utilized for natural language processing, complemented by a platform designed for sharing machine learning models and datasets.
History
Established in 2016 by French founders Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face began with the development of a chatbot application aimed at teenage users. Following the open release of its chatbot model, the company shifted its focus toward building a platform dedicated to machine learning resources.
In April 2021, Hugging Face initiated the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several partners to create an open-source large language model. This effort resulted in 2022 with the launch of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model incorporating 176 billion parameters.
By February 2023, Hugging Face had formed a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer its products to AWS clients and revealed plans for upcoming BLOOM versions to operate on AWS’s Trainium machine learning processors.
In June 2024, together with Meta and Scaleway, Hugging Face introduced an AI accelerator program targeting European startups. Located at STATION F in Paris, this program provides support for startups working with open foundation models through mentoring, AI technologies, and access to computing infrastructure.
On September 23, 2024, Hugging Face joined forces with Meta and UNESCO to unveil an online language translation tool based on Meta's No Language Left Behind model. This service delivers free text translation in over 200 languages, including many that are considered low-resource.
In April 2025, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, a French startup specializing in humanoid robotics established in 2016. CEO Clément Delangue expressed ambitions to propel open-source AI robotics forward through this strategic acquisition.