Why the Future of Machine Learning is Open Source with Huggingface’s Clem Delangue

**Clem Delangue** (0:07)
In traditional science, it's really used to be the norm that you would have some research and some research paper, and it wouldn't make its way into production before 10 years, 20 years. And what we're seeing in Machine Learning is that it's actually making its way into production after a year, a few months, a few weeks, sometimes a few days now.
And I really hope in the future that we'll keep this very fast virtual cycle, iteration loop between science to production to science, because to me, it's the main driver for the speed of progress in Machine Learning.

**Sarah Guo** (0:48)
This is the No Priors podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (0:51)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (0:52)
We invest in, advise, and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (0:55)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (1:08)
Originally created to be an AI chatbot companion, six years later, Huggingface is now the collaboration backbone of the open-source AI research ecosystem. The company is currently valued at $2 billion with over 10,000 companies using their platform, including Bing and Apple, and has expanded from popular NLP models to other modalities, including media, biology, and more.
Our guest, Clem Delangue, founder and CEO of Huggingface, is central to the open-source movement in machine learning. We'll talk about how he built this company, why open-source is the future of AI, and what he sees on the horizon. Clem, welcome to the podcast.

**Clem Delangue** (1:41)
Thanks for having me.

**Elad Gil** (1:42)
Thanks so much for joining us. So we're hoping to start with your background, which I think is really interesting.
You grew up in France, we ran an electronics shop on eBay. It was 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 Huggingface?

**Clem Delangue** (1:57)
Yeah, it's actually quite a funny story because I was one of the biggest French sellers on eBay.
I was kind of like the user-facing team member.
And so they were sending me to all these trade shows in France, which were 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 skipping their money or blocking their accounts or things like that. It was basically kind of like the worst days ever. But during one of these days, I bumped into a guy with big, round glasses looking very nerdy. And I remember pretty vividly, he told me like, eBay, you acquired not so long ago a barcode scanning company called Red Laser to recognize objects. But you need to know that pretty soon with Machine Learning. I mean, he wasn't calling it Machine Learning at the time, but 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's this crazy guy? But at night, I kind of like did my research and realized that it was a pretty legit guy coming out of a legit engineering school in France with a small startups, which raised a little bit of money. And one thing after the other, I ended up leaving eBay to join the startup doing Machine Learning for computer vision. I made the move to Machine Learning. It was almost 15 years ago now.
I don't regret it at all. It's funny how like a single small encounter like that can completely change your trajectory.

**Elad Gil** (3:33)
That's really cool. Could you tell us a bit more about the early iteration of Huggingface, how you decide to start it, the early days as a talking emoji and where it went from there?

**Clem Delangue** (3:41)
Yeah, absolutely. With my co-founders, Julien and Thomas, we kind of like always share this passion and excitement for AI and for Machine Learning. And when we started Huggingface, we were like, okay, what can we work on that is both scientifically challenging but also fun? Okay, we're going to build some sort of an AI Tamagotchi. We were heavy users of Alexa and Siri, and we're like, why is this so boring? Why is it only talking about productivity stuff? Why is it just telling you the weather?
And so we started to build that kind of like some sort of an AI friends, Tamagotchi, AI. Basically what you see in a lot of movies as sci-fi, a lot of what people are using ChatGPT for today, actually.
And we did that for almost three years, got some level of traction, billions of messages exchanged between users and the chat bots. So that's how Huggingface started.