Open source AI matters more than ever, according to Hugging Face's Clem Delangue
Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he's worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
How Chinese labs are producing the majority of open models being downloaded in the U.S., and why Delangue thinks that's a problem worth fixing rather than a reason to distrust open source itself.
How Hugging Face is choosing capital efficiency over the usual Silicon Valley fundraising playbook, including why the company turned down a large investment from Nvidia last year.
Why he sees robotics as an even more urgent case for open, transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given how much of your home and family life a robot ends up seeing.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Breaking down open source growth data
04:34 What's driving the open source resurgence
08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how?
10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads
16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration
24:03 Hugging Face's approach to legal risk
28:00 Turning down Nvidia
31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics
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Building the Open Source AI Revolution (with Hugging Face CEO, Clem Delangue)
We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!
Links:
Hugging Face
Hugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billion
Sponsors:
Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
20VC: Who Wins the AI Race; Startups or Incumbents & Does Having Proprietary Data Really Matter For Startups Today?
One of the core questions in AI and investing today; who wins, startups or incumbents? Startups have speed and innovation but incumbents have scale, resources, and distribution?
Today we hear from 6 leading investors and founders discussing where they place their bets who has the advantage; startups or incumbents?
Emad Mostaque is CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN.
Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Professor at NYU. He was the founding Director of FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science.
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few.
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve "Software 3.0" companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock.
Vince Hankes is a Partner @ Thrive Capital where he has led the firm's investments in OpenAI, Melio, and Airplane.dev. Prior to Thrive, Vince learned the craft of venture from Lee Fixel @ Tiger.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
The Question of the Day:
Who wins? Startups or Incumbents?
20VC: Why The Future of AI Is Open Not Closed, Why We Are Years Away From AI Being Autonomous, Why AI Founders Do Not Need to Move to the Valley & Why Founders Should Not Meet Investors in Between Rounds with Clem Delangue @ Hugging Face
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. To date, Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few. Prior to Hugging Face, Clem was in product and marketing at two different startups both of which were acquired.
In Today's Episode with Clem Delangue:
1. From Tamagotchi to Leading the World of AI:
How did a Tamagotchi startup turn into one of the hottest AI startups in the world?
What does Clem know now that he wishes he had known when he started?
What are Clem's biggest pieces of advice to founders on pivoting?
2. AI: Trend or Transformation:
To what extent does Clem believe the current hype in AI is justified?
What is overblown? What have been some true and groundbreaking developments?
How far away does Clem believe AGI is?
What is a massive misconception the public has that Clem wishes he could change?
3. Open vs Closed: Which Model Wins:
Why does Clem believe the future of AI will be won by open-source?
What is his reasoning to suggest closed is fundamentally a weaker model?
Does Clem acknowledge that in the short term, enterprises will buy from a closed model with greater ease? How does he plan to tackle this?
4. Regulation: What Happens Now:
What regulatory changes need to be made in the world of AI most urgently?
Is Elon Musk right to suggest the immediate pausing of developments in AI?
What does Clem believe to be the most likely scenario to AI regulation in the next 12 months?
5. Fundraising: Lessons and Reflection on Raising $160M:
Do AI startups fundamentally cost more money than normal startups to build?
Why does Clem not meet investors in between rounds?
What does Clem believe is the most helpful thing an investor can do?
What are Clem's spiciest takes on venture as a financing model?
Why the Future of Machine Learning is Open Source with Huggingface’s Clem Delangue
After starting as a talking emoji companion, Hugging Face is now an organizing force for the open source AI research ecosystem. Its models are used by companies such as Apple, Salesforce and Microsoft, and it's working to become the GitHub for ML.
This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face. Clem shares how they shifted away from their original product, why every employee at Hugging Face is responsible for community-building, the modalities he's most interested in, and what role open source has in the AI race.
Show Links:
Hugging Face website
The $2 Billion Emoji: Hugging Face Wants To Be Launchpad For A Machine Learning Revolution - Forbes
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ClementDelangue
Show Notes:
[01:53] - how Clem first became interested in ML, being shouted at by eBay sellers, and the foretelling of the end of barcode scanning
[3:34] - early iterations of Hugging Face, trying to make a less boring AI tamagotchi, and switching directions towards open source tools
[5:36] - advice for founders considering a change in direction, 30%+ experimentation
[7:39] - 1st users, MLTwitter, approach to community
[10:47] - enterprise ML maturity, days to production
[12:54] - open source vs. proprietary models
[15:56] - main model tasks, architectures and sizes
[19:12] - decentralized infrastructure, data opt out
[24:16] - Hugging Face’s business model, GitHub
[28:09] - What Clem is excited about in AI
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