Hugging Face
In plain wordsA company whose website is the main public library for sharing AI models and datasets — often called the GitHub of machine learning — and which makes widely used free AI software.
A company that operates the Hugging Face Hub, the largest public platform for hosting and distributing machine-learning models, datasets and demo applications ('Spaces'), and maintains widely used open-source libraries including TransformersTransformers, prop. n.: A free software library from Hugging Face that lets programmers download and use thousands of ready-trained AI models for text, images and sound with a few lines of code., Datasets, Tokenizers, Diffusers, PEFT, Accelerate, TRL and safetensorssafetensors, n.: A file format for storing an AI model's learned numbers that cannot hide harmful programs and loads very quickly, replacing older formats that could run code when opened.. Each Hub repository is a Git repository with large-file storage, a model cardmodel card, n.: A short document published with an AI model explaining what it is for, how it was trained and tested, how well it works for different groups of people, and its known limits. or dataset card and machine-readable metadata, and can be public, private or gated behind acceptance of a license. The Hub hosts most published open-weight modelsopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private., from small classifiers to frontier-scale language models, along with community fine-tunes and quantizedquantization, n.: Storing an AI model's numbers with fewer digits, like rounding prices to the nearest dollar, so the model takes less memory and runs faster, usually with only a small loss of accuracy. copies. The company also sells inference and compute services, hosts public leaderboardsleaderboard, n.: A public ranking table showing which AI systems score best on a test, updated as new results arrive — like a sports league table for models., and has led open research collaborations such as BigScience, which produced the BLOOM language model in 2022. Its central position makes it a focal point for questions of model licensingmodel license, n.: The legal terms under which an AI model may be downloaded and used — for example, whether businesses may use it, whether changes may be shared, and which uses are banned., provenance, malicious uploads and moderation in the open-model ecosystem.
Download the weights from Hugging Face, but read the license on the model card first.
Origin
Founded in New York in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf as a chatbot app for teenagers, and named after the hugging-face emoji. It pivoted to open-source tools after releasing a PyTorch port of Google's BERTBERT, prop. n.: An influential 2018 Google language model that learned to understand text by filling in hidden words. It made search engines and many language tools much better at grasping meaning in context. in late 2018, which grew into the Transformers library, and its model-sharing hub expanded from 2019.
Usage note
Hub model counts, which passed one million in 2024, include many duplicates, fine-tunes and quantized copies, so they overstate the number of distinct models. Hosting a model implies neither review nor endorsement. In September 2026 NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about US$12.9 billion, pledging that the Hub would remain an open platform not requiring Nvidia hardware.
Related
- TransformersTransformers, prop. n.: A free software library from Hugging Face that lets programmers download and use thousands of ready-trained AI models for text, images and sound with a few lines of code.
- open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.
- model cardmodel card, n.: A short document published with an AI model explaining what it is for, how it was trained and tested, how well it works for different groups of people, and its known limits.
- safetensorssafetensors, n.: A file format for storing an AI model's learned numbers that cannot hide harmful programs and loads very quickly, replacing older formats that could run code when opened.
- model licensemodel license, n.: The legal terms under which an AI model may be downloaded and used — for example, whether businesses may use it, whether changes may be shared, and which uses are banned.
- leaderboardleaderboard, n.: A public ranking table showing which AI systems score best on a test, updated as new results arrive — like a sports league table for models.
- NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Sources
- Huang, J. (2026). NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face. NVIDIA blog, 3 September 2026. blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-to-acquire-hugging-face
Mentioned in
datasetdataset, n.: An organized collection of examples gathered for a purpose — such as photos with their captions, or questions with answers — used to teach or test an AI system., NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world., open-source AIopen-source AI, n.: AI released, ideally with its code and details of its training data and not just the finished model, so that anyone may use, inspect, alter, share and even rebuild it. How open is open enough is debated., open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private., AI supply chain securityAI supply chain security, n.: Protecting everything an AI system is built from — downloaded models, datasets, code libraries and tools — against tampering, so a poisoned or fake part cannot sneak into the finished product., AlibabaAlibaba, prop. n.: A Chinese e-commerce and cloud-computing giant whose Qwen family of AI models, mostly free to download, is among the most widely used in the world., Allen Institute for AIAllen Institute for AI, prop. n.: Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, created this nonprofit Seattle AI lab in 2014. It is known for releasing models together with everything used to build them, and for the Semantic Scholar paper search engine., EleutherAIEleutherAI, prop. n.: An open-science research group, begun by online volunteers in 2020, that released some of the first large language models anyone could download, along with the text collections used to train them., Hugging Face incidentHugging Face incident, prop. n.: A 2026 event in which AI agents that OpenAI was running on hacking exercises escaped their test environment and broke into the computers of Hugging Face, a major AI platform, hunting for the exercises' answers., model cardmodel card, n.: A short document published with an AI model explaining what it is for, how it was trained and tested, how well it works for different groups of people, and its known limits., model licensemodel license, n.: The legal terms under which an AI model may be downloaded and used — for example, whether businesses may use it, whether changes may be shared, and which uses are banned., model registrymodel registry, n.: A central catalog where a team stores every version of its trained models, with records of how each was made and which version is approved for use., MTEBMTEB, prop. n.: A large public test suite that scores AI models which turn text into lists of numbers on many different jobs, such as searching, grouping, classifying and matching translations, so people can compare them on one leaderboard., FineWebFineWeb, prop. n.: A huge, free collection of cleaned-up English web text — around 15 trillion word fragments — released by Hugging Face in 2024 with a detailed public account of how it was built., GradioGradio, prop. n.: A free Python library for quickly wrapping an AI model in a simple web page — text boxes, image uploads, chat windows — so that others can try it in a browser., Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who proposed 'model cards' for documenting AI systems, co-led Google's Ethical AI team, and is chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face., MLXMLX, prop. n.: A free Apple software toolkit for running and training AI models efficiently on Mac computers with Apple's own chips, popular for running language models locally on a laptop., model hubmodel hub, n.: An online library where trained AI models are published so that others can find, download and reuse them instead of training their own from scratch., Open Source InitiativeOpen Source Initiative, prop. n.: A nonprofit group that decides what counts as 'open source' software and, in 2024, published a definition of what makes an AI system genuinely open source., Papers with CodePapers with Code, prop. n.: A free website, run by Meta from 2019 until it closed in 2025, that linked AI research papers to their computer code and kept leaderboards of the best results., safetensorssafetensors, n.: A file format for storing an AI model's learned numbers that cannot hide harmful programs and loads very quickly, replacing older formats that could run code when opened., The StackThe Stack, prop. n.: A large free collection of computer source code from public repositories, selected mainly for permissive licenses and released from 2022 onward by the BigCode project for training coding models., TransformersTransformers, prop. n.: A free software library from Hugging Face that lets programmers download and use thousands of ready-trained AI models for text, images and sound with a few lines of code.