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The start-up wants to accelerate AI app development using open models with ‘zero configuration required’.
AI start-up Hugging Face has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others to launch its new open model offering to developers.
The New York-based company, which has been riding the AI wave, is on a mission to “democratise good machine learning”. Its latest offering, titled ‘HUGS’, is optimised to run open large language models (LLMs) on a variety of hardware accelerators.
In a blogpost, the team said HUGS requires zero configuration to set up. “One key challenge developers and organisations face is the engineering complexity of optimising inference workloads for LLMs on a particular GPU or AI accelerator,” it said.
“With HUGS, we enable maximum throughput deployments for the most popular open LLMs with zero configuration required. Each deployment configuration offered by HUGS is fully tested and maintained to work out of the box.”
Founded in 2016, Hugging Face has built a platform where members of the machine learning community can collaborate and host their AI models and code, in a similar style to GitHub. The start-up hosts various tools to support developers, along with subscription options with extra features for enterprises.
While it’s far from new, the open-source AI platform has garnered significant attention in recent years from the biggest names in the industry as the generative AI wave swelled.
In February 2023, AWS teamed up with the start-up to make generative AI more accessible and cost-efficient.
Later that same year, multiple tech giants including Nvidia, Salesforce, Google and Amazon participated in a major funding round, giving the machine learning company $235m and putting its valuation at $4.5bn.
Among the models on its platform is a large geospatial foundation model from IBM and NASA, which is available to the public and aims to provide an easier and faster way for researchers to analyse and draw insights from large geospatial datasets.
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