HuggingFace

Hugging Face is an AI company and open-source community focused on natural language processing and more generally machine learning. It develops tools and a platform for sharing models, datasets, and demos, with the aim of democratizing access to modern AI.

Its core open-source libraries include Transformers, a library for state-of-the-art natural language processing models that run on PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX; Datasets, a collection and processing toolkit for ready-to-use datasets; and Tokenizers, a fast tokenizer library written in Rust. The company also operates the Hugging Face Hub, a central repository where researchers and developers publish pretrained models, datasets, and evaluation results, and where users can host interactive demonstrations via Spaces, which run in web apps built with Gradio or Streamlit.

Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face began as a startup focused on conversational AI and later pivoted toward open-source NLP tooling and community building. It has grown through collaborations with academia and industry and has attracted significant funding to support its ecosystem.

The platform promotes open science through model cards and datasets descriptions, licensing information, and safety and bias considerations. It emphasizes interoperability and ease of use, enabling researchers to reproduce experiments and deploy models in production.

Applications span tasks such as text classification, translation, summarization, question answering, and more. Hugging Face is widely used in both research and production settings and has become a central node in the ML community for sharing pretrained models, benchmarks, and demos.