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 According to a recent report, the global Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) market is expected to grow at 44% CAGR to reach $13.3 billion by 2030 from $720 million in 2022. MLOps vendors perform activities that range from supporting model training, testing and validation, deployment, automated model validation, and continuous delivery and deployment.
 Hugging Face’s OfferingsNew York-based Hugging Face was set up in 2016 by entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf who wanted to build a chatbot app that would focus on teenagers. It was going to be an app that would generate a digital friend for teenagers that they could chat and take selfies with. However, when the founders published their first open-source model, Hugging Face realized that the developers were more attracted by its ML code. The company pivoted itself with a mission to becoming the “GitHub for machine learning”.Today, Hugging Face is known for its platform where AI developers can share code, models, and data sets, and use its developer tools to train open-source AI models. While BLOOM is its version of an open-source LLM, Hugging Face is known for its website platform that allows users to upload models and weights. Additionally, it also offers a series of software tools that allow users to get models working quickly, clean large datasets, or evaluate their performance.Similar to GitHub, developers can post their projects on Hugging Face while continuing to work on them. It offers several data science hosting and development tools and provides web apps to demo AI-powered applications along with libraries for ML tasks such as dataset processing. It offers some paid services such as AutoTrain, which helps automate the task of training AI models, Inference API which allows developers to host models, and Infinity which helps accelerate the speed at which an in-production model processes data.Its latest tool, OpenAI-Gradio, released earlier this month simplifies the process of integrating OpenAI’s LLMs into web applications. In a few easy steps, developers can install the package, set their OpenAI API key, launch a fully functional web app, and deploy advanced AI models quickly. Hugging Face believes that by launching products like these, it will continue to make AI development more accessible to a wider range of businesses. Small and mid-sized companies will be able to experiment with AI-powered tools without requiring complex infrastructure. According to a recent post, the company now hosts over a million free public models on its platform.
 Hugging Face’s FinancialsHugging Face is privately held so far and does not disclose financials. Earlier this summer, the company had posted that it was profitable. Reports last year pegged its GitHub for machine learning from its 10,000+ paying customers.Hugging Face has seen a significant increase in valuation over the past few years. It has raised $395 million so far from investors including Betaworks Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm. Its last round of funding was held in August 2023 when it raised $235 million from big tech investors at a valuation of $4.5 billion. An earlier round held in April 2022 had valued the company at $2 billion.Hugging Face competes directly with companies like H20.AI that offer a similar product. Recently, Microsoft also announced the launch of Git Hubs Models which is expected to allow developers to test and experiment with their AI models for free.  More By This Author:AI Unicorns: Mistral AI Brings Stiff Competition To Other LLMs
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