Hugging Face CEO says 'planets aligned' for Nvidia deal, aims to reach 100M users

The chief exec of Hugging Face says he wants to take the platform to 100 million users within the next few years, and Nvidia’s backing could help it get there, despite rejecting an investment offer from the chip giant last year. On a conference call to discuss Nvidia's agreed $12.9 billion takeover of the AI model hub, Clément Delangue said it gives Hugging Face the security to think about the long term. “With a big supporter like Nvidia, we can think about the next 10 years and really optimize for maximum impact in the community and in the field,” he said. “We have 18 million AI builders using the Hugging Face platform today, and our goal is to get to 100 million AI builders in the next few years, and we think with the support of Nvidia, we have kind of like more chances to get there faster.” GitHub, to which Hugging Face is often likened, currently boasts more than 180 million developers. But one caller pointed out that the company had previously turned down a large investment offer from Nvidia – $500 million – because it wanted to preserve the company's independence and avoid having a dominant investor have too much influence over the platform. What changed their minds? “Well, the reality is that we never comment on fundraising and these kind of things when they don't materialize,” Delangue said, mysteriously. “The truth is that throughout the life of Hugging Face, we always got quite a lot of offers of investments or acquisitions that we turned down in the past. But I think this summer the planets aligned, especially because of the fact that we increasingly were convinced that Nvidia would be the perfect home for us, and so we decided that it was the best thing for Hugging Face, but also for the field and for AI in general,” he added. One might surmise that the astronomical alignment may have had something to do with the planet AI Bubble entering the constellation of Circular Financing, but such would be mere speculation. On the question of antitrust, the two companies did not seem concerned that regulators may object to one of the largest players in the AI market assimilating what is regarded as the go-to hub for AI development. “The platform, you know, is open. It's neutral,” stated Nvidia’s VP and GM of enterprise computing Justin Boitano. “Nvidia's role in this is helping them scale and expand access to AI globally, and so we think regulators are going to see this as overwhelmingly positive because it's going to infuse AI into every country, into every industry, and really give everybody an opportunity to build their own intelligence from this open foundation of Hugging Face,” he said. Delangue went further, claiming that the merger would actually help keep models open for everyone. “More and more of the power and control is concentrated in the hands of proprietary APIs that obviously are an important part of the ecosystem, but open-source AI and a platform like Hugging Face is almost, by definition, kind of like a deconcentration platform, and allows for some healthy competition, and so this is kind of like a much-needed thing in the world.” The pair also insisted that Hugging Face would not become a repository of models targeting only Nvidia platforms. “The Hugging Face team have built an amazing community, and Clem highlighted they've got 18 million users, 200,000 enterprises, and he wants to, you know, 5x that at least in terms of reach,” said Boitano. “The only way you do that is by building the trust of the developer community and giving developers access to run the models and access the data sets from any platform in the world that they want to run it on. So we are incentivized, obviously, and motivated to keep this open and neutral, and ensure that developers can work wherever they want to work, into and across every cloud provider, every neo cloud, and into every datacenter, and make it available on every device,” he claimed. As far as next steps go, Delangue hinted that the pair may have something to discuss soon. “We'll carefully work on some initiatives, some plans, some new releases in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. There's going to be a lot of exciting stuff coming out from us and from Nvidia in the next few weeks and next two months.” ®