Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an American AI company and open-source platform that has become the central hub for sharing, discovering, and deploying machine learning models. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, the platform hosts over 2 million open models, more than 500,000 datasets, and roughly 1 million interactive demo applications called Spaces. Its developer community has grown to over 10 million users, making it the largest open-source AI ecosystem in the world.

The platform's core open-source stack includes widely adopted libraries such as Transformers (for working with pre-trained models), Datasets (for loading and processing data), Diffusers (for diffusion models like Stable Diffusion), PEFT (parameter-efficient fine-tuning), Accelerate (distributed training), TRL (reinforcement learning from human feedback), and smolagents (lightweight AI agents). The Transformers library alone has become a de facto standard for working with models like BERT, GPT, LLaMA, and thousands of others.

For production deployments, Hugging Face offers Inference Endpoints, Text Generation Inference (TGI), Text Embeddings Inference (TEI), and AutoTrain for no-code model training. Over 10,000 companies including Intel, Pfizer, Bloomberg, and eBay use the platform. Nearly every major open-weight model - from Meta's LLaMA to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral - is distributed through Hugging Face, making it an essential piece of infrastructure in the modern AI ecosystem.