With all the drama surrounding Sam Altma’s firing, then rehiring, by OpenAI, it’s easy to forget they aren’t the only horse in the AI race. Another hot AI company, with probably my favorite startup name of all time, is Hugging Face who lets users create interactive, in-browser demos of machine learning models that let users showcase and test models more easily.

In an interview with reporters Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said:

“I think a lot of companies, organizations now are kind of wondering about the risk about outsourcing their AI to just one AI provider. It creates, obviously a single point of failure for them — a little bit for the field too — so they’re investigating different solutions.” 

While Hugging Face wouldn’t reveal how much new business they have picked up in the wake of the OpenAI drama, they have shared they have more than 50,000 organizations on the platform, and 10,000 paying customers which must be bringing in a nice chunk of change. Hugging Face now hosts more than 500,000 AI models, 250,000 datasets, and hosts over 1 million repositories. The company now has a head count of 170 employees as of August.

Hugging Face operates in the MLOps category of tools for streamlining the process of taking AI models to production and then maintaining and monitoring them. The MLOps market is projected to reach $16.61 billion by 2030.

According to an article on Hugging Face in TechCrunch they said “Hugging Face recently worked with Nvidia to expand access to cloud compute via Nvidia’s DGX computing platform. It has a partnership with Amazon to extend its products to AWS customers and leverage Amazon’s custom Trainium chips to train the next generation of Bloom. And Hugging Face collaborated with Microsoft on Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI models into scalable production solutions hosted through Azure.”

Hugging Face is based in New York, and has raised a total of $395 million over 6 funding rounds, including their latest Series D funding round where they raised $235 million from heavy-weights including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm. Hugging Face has a valuation of $4.5 billion, which is reportedly more than 100 times their annualized revenue.

OpenAI rival Hugging Face says it’s seeing more client interest after Sam Altman fiasco