Hugging Face is a New York-based AI platform company founded in 2016, originally as a consumer chatbot app before pivoting to become the leading open-source hub for machine learning models, datasets, and tools. The company's platform hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source AI models and is widely used by researchers, startups, and enterprises to discover, share, and deploy machine learning models across text, image, audio, and other modalities.
Led by co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue, Hugging Face has positioned itself as a neutral, community-oriented infrastructure layer for the AI ecosystem, maintaining open-source libraries like Transformers and Diffusers that have become standard tooling across the machine learning research and engineering community, while also offering paid enterprise hosting and compute services.