IBM (IBM) and NASA are partnering to develop an open-source AI model for weather and climate analysis. The foundational model trained on NASA's data is now available on Hugging Face, the AI startup platform.
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue joins Catalysts to discuss the company's partnership with IBM and NASA and its outlook as generative AI seeps into all corners of the market.
Hugging Face now has more than one million public models available on its platform, with one new repository being created every 10 seconds. These models encompass everything from chatbots to areas like biology and chemistry.
Delangue calls Hugging Face's partnership with IBM and NASA an example of "AI for good," explaining, "The number of people who die from our inability to predict weather events is massive, and if you can use AI to reduce that number just by predicting these events, maybe a few hours before, this is a massive positive impact that AI has on the world."
While Hugging Face is an open-source platform, Delangue notes that the company has always been "very intentional about picking the revenue streams and the offerings that are very much kind of like creating value for customers." This way, Hugging Face has become profitable, which Delangue notes is "quite rare for AI startups."
"It's incredible that we managed to keep such uncertainty at such high level of revenue. That's the nature of the field. But we've taken a little bit of a different direction where we focus more on profitable, sustainable revenue because we build a platform for the community. And so we want to build that for the long term," he adds.
In addition to the one million public models offered by the platform, Hugging Face has nearly as many private models that are being used by companies internally. "So we're seeing this transition from AI for prototypes, for experiments, to AI in production. And in terms of revenue, I think that means more companies using our enterprise hub offering that has been very, very successful... in general, kind of like looking at more of the costs for AI, especially when you scale to make sure you can keep margins that are sustainable," he tells Yahoo Finance.
As more people and companies adopt generative AI, Delangue believes that right now, "We're quite mainstream on the usage side." He explains that there's been a "catch-up" from investors and the public on the technology, adding, "We're at the phase where it's slowed down a little bit, or at least we have a more realistic view of what AI can do and can't do. It's more mature. And hopefully in the next few years, we'll keep improving the use cases, expand from just text to all the other domains... and really make it make it mainstream."
Watch the video above to find out whether Delangue plans to take Hugging Face public anytime soon.
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This post was written by Melanie Riehl