Hugging Face was a sassy chatbot.

Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf and Clem Delangue 🤗 founded Hugging Face in 2016, and it was originally a chatbot app for teenagers.

“Basically we started a year ago with this goal of not building a useful AI or building a productivity AI but building an AI that is fun to chat with. We really focus on the entertainment aspect of it, the emotional aspect of it”

They faced multiple challenges, like long term dependencies, adapting to teenager language, understanding jokes and emojis…etc

While tackling those problems, they started blogging about their research, publishing papers, releasing open source tools, for example:

• The “Meta-Learning a Dynamical Language Model” paper they published at ICLR in 2018, in which they tackle the long term dependencies problem: https://lnkd.in/eT5DtF6H

• The neuralcoref tool they opensourced in 2017, for which the demo is still online on their website: https://lnkd.in/e4p65UKC, as well as the code: https://lnkd.in/eJTGaJKD, and the associated blog post: https://lnkd.in/eMWu8CMn

They pivoted in the end of 2019 and became the platform we know today, raised a $40M Series B in 2021, a $100M Series C in 2022 and a $235M Series D last year. Since then they kept empowering the open source AI community.

Attached some screenshots from the early days :)