Hugging Face's CEO on Open Source AI, Model Routing, and the Future of Competition

**Clément Delangue** (0:00)
I think distillation is a very common practice that everyone is using. It's something that everyone uses, but that is not the main reason for success. Like if you suck, you suck with or without distillation. It's hard for me to say like, oh, poor entropy, poor open AI, you're getting unfairly competed with when you're like the fastest growing company in the world. If anything, I think they need more competition than less competition, because we're heading towards a world where a few companies are completely dominating, concentrating all power, all capabilities, all wealth.
And that's much more dangerous than them maybe losing a couple of billion dollars of revenue.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
As Aion models become more powerful, governments are beginning to ask new questions about safety, regulation, and who should control access to frontier technology.
In this episode, Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini sit down with Hugging Face co-founder and CEO, Clément Delangue, to discuss why he believes open source AI is inherently safer, what Hugging Face reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue says about the business of open source, and why the next phase of AI may be defined by model routing rather than a handful of dominant frontier labs. They also discuss GPT-5, AI regulation, local models, Europe's AI ecosystem, and the growing importance of competition across the AI stack.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:35)
And we are back with Clément Delangue from Hugging Face, his second time on MTS. Hugging Face is basically the open source AI platform. So, Clément, welcome back to MTS.
Absolutely.

**Sofia Puccini** (1:50)
Yeah, so, well, go on. I think we're about to say the same thing.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:54)
Yeah, we were talking about this interesting recent piece of news where basically the government is going to restrict GPT-5.6's release sort of unilaterally, basically without precedent. I don't think the government has ever asked a Frontier Lab not to release a model before.
Certainly, the government has not asked a Frontier Lab to be able to oversee which customers the model is released to. This seems very unnatural. What are your takes on this?

**Clément Delangue** (2:26)
Yeah, so it was funny. I was in DC last week, so I kind of had some sort of front row seat to what was happening. An interesting anecdote is that we bumped into Tom Brown there, the co-founder of Entropiq, and we were like, well, it seems to be like a change of staff or something like that before it was made public that they changed a little bit the people talking to the White House there. Listen, I mean, what I've seen, what I'm hearing is that there's a lot of interests from a lot of people in the USG to really understand the risks of AI and take a safe approach to the deployment of Frontier models. To be honest, I can't really blame them because of the fact that the Frontier Labs were basically doing marketing for the past few years. If you remember, GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. It was like, what, like four or five years ago.
And so, you know, I don't really blame them for doing things like that. I just hope that progressively we'll get a little bit more transparency about, you know, what is safe, not safe, so more focus on, you know, transparent evaluation of models and things like that. I also hope that it's going to stay contained to, you know, a few frontier journalist models, because frankly, I think they're the most dangerous ones, right? And also, you know, these companies are trillion-dollar companies with armies of, you know, DC people, so they can kind of like deal with it. I hope it's going to stay contained to that and not permeate to a lot of different players, for example, start-ups, small companies, you know, academia, or like people who don't necessarily have, you know, the money, the size, the ability to really deal with these things.
That would be kind of like my main concern.

**Sofia Puccini** (4:36)
Totally, yeah. What we were just talking about before was just like, is this, could this be applied to open-source companies and models in any way?
Like, is there a way that the US government could come in and restrict open-source companies, either practically or legally?

**Clément Delangue** (4:53)
I don't think so because, you know, I think open-source models are inherently less dangerous than kind of like the models that are getting restricted now. Because, you know, these models are a little bit ahead in terms of like being closer to the frontier. Also, open-source models are less generous, they're more specialized, and there's just like nobody or very few people focusing on building dangerous like cyber security capabilities. So it's like a little bit different than kind of like the proprietary labs.