No Priors Ep. 5 | With Huggingface’s Clem Delangue

After starting as a talking emoji companion, Hugging Face is now an organizing force for the open source AI research ecosystem. Its models are used by companies such as Apple, Salesforce and Microsoft, and it's working to become the GitHub for ML. This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talk to Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face. Clem shares how they shifted away from their original product, why every employee at Hugging Face is responsible for community-building, the modalities he's most interested in, and what role open source has in the AI race. 00:00 - Introduction 01:53 - how Clem first became interested in ML, being shouted at by eBay sellers, and the foretelling of the end of barcode scanning 03:34 - early iterations of Hugging Face, trying to make a less boring AI tamagotchi, and switching directions towards open source tools 05:36 - advice for founders considering a change in direction, 30%+ experimentation 07:39 - 1st users, MLTwitter, approach to community 10:47 - enterprise ML maturity, days to production 12:54 - open source vs. proprietary models 15:56 - main model tasks, architectures and sizes 19:12 - decentralized infrastructure, data opt out 24:16 - Hugging Face’s business model, GitHub 28:09 - What Clem is excited about in AI