Hugging Face's CEO on Open Source AI, Model Routing, and the Future of Competition
As governments weigh new restrictions on frontier AI models, one question is becoming increasingly important: what role should open source play in the future of artificial intelligence?
Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini speak with Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue about AI regulation, open source safety, model routing, and why he believes competition—not consolidation—is essential for the industry's future.
They discuss GPT-5, government oversight of frontier models, Hugging Face surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue, local AI, China's open-source ecosystem, Europe's AI ambitions, and why routing workloads across specialized models could fundamentally reshape where value is created in AI.
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Hugging Face's Clem Delangue on Open Source AI and the LLM Bubble | MTS Live
Clem Delangue joins MTS to discuss the global open-source AI landscape, the current large language model bubble, and the future of consumer robotics.
Originally aired on MTS, Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini speak with Clément Delangue, CEO at Hugging Face, about the global open-source AI race, why he believes the real bubble is in API-based large language models, and how robotics could become the next major interface for AI. They also discuss AI safety, U.S.-China competition, open-weight models, and why Hugging Face became the infrastructure layer for open AI development.
Resources:
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Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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(BNS) Hugging Face Founder Clément Delangue
Clem discusses his journey from early computing experiences to founding Hugging Face, emphasizing the importance of community, collaboration, and open-source technology in the AI landscape. He reflects on the evolution of technology, the significance of user feedback, and the need for a diverse range of AI models. Clem also shares insights on the startup ecosystem in Europe and the unique advantages of New York City for AI entrepreneurs.
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Clement Delangue of Hugging Face on building the GitHub of machine learning
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, recently it is expanding to more machine learning domains, including computer vision and reinforcement learning.
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564: Clem Delangue on Hugging Face and Transformers
In this episode, Jon speaks with the CEO of Hugging Face, Clem Delangue, about open-source machine learning and transformer architectures, while attending the ScaleUp:AI Conference in New York.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/564
Clément Delangue — The Power of the Open Source Community
Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading.
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Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Hugging Face started as an open source NLP library and has quickly grown into a commercial product used by over 5,000 companies.
Connect with Clem:
📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue
📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/
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🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-clement-delangue 🌟
⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Sneak peek and intro
0:56 What is Hugging Face?
4:15 The success of Hugging Face Transformers
7:53 Open source and virtuous cycles
10:37 Working with both TensorFlow and PyTorch
13:20 The "Write With Transformer" project
14:36 Transfer learning in NLP
16:43 BERT and DistilBERT
22:33 GPT
26:32 The power of the open source community
29:40 Current applications of NLP
35:15 The Turing Test and conversational AI
41:19 Why speech is an upcoming field within NLP
43:44 The human challenges of machine learning
Links Discussed:
📍 Write With Transformer, Hugging Face Transformer's text generation demo: https://transformer.huggingface.co/
📍 "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
📍 EleutherAI and GPT-Neo: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo]
📍 Rasa, open source conversational AI: https://rasa.com/
📍 Roblox article on BERT: https://blog.roblox.com/2020/05/scaled-bert-serve-1-billion-daily-requests-cpus/
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Social AI with Hugging Face
Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.
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Featuring:
Clément Delangue – Website, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Hugging Face
Voice Boloss
Transformer model episodes: BERT
GPT-2
Hugging Face’s Pytorch pre-trained model repo
Rasa
Lyrebird
Allen Institute for AI
AllenNLP
OpenAI
Fast.ai
Betaworks Synthetic camp
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