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

(instrumental music) . Clem, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, thanks so much for joining us. So, um, we were hoping to start with your background, which I think is really interesting. You grew up in France, where you ran an electronics shop on eBay, and were just so prolific that you ended up earning an internship opportunity with eBay. How'd you go from that to image recognition and eventually to Hugging Face?

Yeah, it's actually quite a funny story, um, because I was one of the biggest French seller on, on eBay when I was working with them. I was kind of like the user-facing, uh, team member, and so they were sending me to all these, like, trade shows in France, uh, which, which were, like, the worst experiences ever, because at the time, PayPal belonged to eBay, and so we had a shared booth. And so all the PayPal users would come to the booth and basically shout at me, because PayPal was keeping their money or blocking their accounts o- or things like that. It was basically kind of like the worst days ever. Uh, but during one of, one of these days, I kind of like, uh, uh, bumped into a guy with, like, big round glasses, like looking very, very nerdy, and, um, I, I remember pretty vividly, he told me, like, "Oh, you guys are eBay. Uh, you acquired not so long ago a barcode scanning company, uh, called, uh, red, Red Laser, to recognize objects and be able to, you know, show listings to, to people. Uh, but it sucks. You guys, you need to know that's pretty soon with machine learn-" I mean, he wasn't calling it machine learning at the time, but "With, with these new algorithms, you won't even need the barcodes anymore. You'll just recognize the object itself." And at the time, I was like, "Who is this crazy guy?" Wasn't really, uh, paying attention too much. But at night, I kind of like did my research, um, and, and realized that he was a pretty legit guy coming out of a legit, uh, engineering, uh, school in France, uh, with his small startups, uh, which raised a, uh, a little bit of money. Um, and, and one thing after the other, uh, I ended up leaving eBay, uh, to join this startup doing, doing machine learning for computer vision, and that's, uh, kind of like I, I, I made the move to, to machine learning. It was almost 15 years ago now, uh, but I, I, I don't regret it at all. Uh, it's, it's funny how, like, a single small encounter like that can completely change your trajectory.

That's really cool, yeah. I think some other time I'll tell you a bit a- a- about a meeting I had at a trade show that completely took my life in a different direction too, so I think it's kind of odd how sometimes those things happen early in peoples' careers. Um, could you tell us a bit more about the early iteration of Hugging Face, how you decided to start it, the early days as a talking emoji and sort of where, where it went from there?