With a $4.5B valuation, 5M AI builders and 1M public AI models, Hugging Face has emerged as the key collaboration platform for AI, and the heart of the global open source AI community.

In this episode of The MAD Podcast, we sit down with Clément Delangue, its co-founder and CEO, and delve deep into Hugging Face's journey from a fun chatbot to a central hub for AI innovation, the impact of open-source AI and the importance of community-driven development, and discuss the shift from text to other AI modalities like audio, video, chemistry, and biology. We also cover the evolution of Hugging Face's business model, and the different approach to company culture that the founders have implemented over the years.

Hugging Face

Website - https://huggingface.co

Twitter - https://x.com/huggingface

Clem Delangue

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue

Twitter - https://x.com/clemdelangue

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:46) Miami vs. New York vs. San Francisco

(03:25) Current state of open source AI

(11:12) Government regulation of AI

(13:18) What is open source AI?

(15:21) Open source AI: China vs U.S.

(18:32) LLMs vs. SLMs

(22:01) Are commercial LLMs just 'Training Wheels' for enterprises?

(24:26) Software 2.0: built with AI

(28:03) Hugging Face founding story

(37:03) Are there any competitors?

(44:06) Most interesting models on Hugging Face

(50:35) Shifting focus in enterprise solutions

(55:06) Bloom & Idefix

(58:44) The culture of Hugging Face

(01:04:44) The future of Hugging Face