The AI resource repository Hugging Face is a little like GitHub for AI, except a recent news event—an OpenAI model autonomously attacking it—made it famous among people who aren’t developers. Now, according to Business Insider, it’s floating the idea of being acquired. Smart timing!
Insider’s story, which cites anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” says Hugging Face is allied with “a bank”—no word on which one—and does not yet have a deal. Insider says it’s looking to be valued at about $13 billion.
The last official word on Hugging Face’s valuation was back in 2023, when it received a funding round valuing it at $4.5 billion. A large investment offer last year from Nvidia would have valued it at $7 billion, but it turned that offer down.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is mostly known as a place to publish and run AI models, which for starters is a good way to market your work. You can spread news about yourself far and wide if you’re a smalltime lab—or in many cases even a major lab. And why does AI have its own non-GitHub repository? In part because Hugging Face is designed around the enormous file sizes involved in storing model weights. Also, Hugging Face is organized intuitively for AI models.
It makes money in pretty much the same way as GitHub: selling upgraded speed and privacy to enterprise users.
GitHub, for its part, was acquired by Microsoft back in 2018 for $7.5 billion.