Hugging Face, the fast-growing New York-based startup, is making headlines for hosting the highly-anticipated ‘Woodstock of AI’, an open-source event held in San Francisco on July 11-12. The Exploratorium in Downtown San Francisco welcomed an incredible 5,000 attendees that paid homage to the power of open-source development in the AI community. This unprecedented gathering was catalyzed three weeks ago, when Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue announced his intentions of wanting to meet with fellow techies interested in AI development.
Hugging Face is one of the leading players in advancing the promise of open-source AI development and makes state-of-the-art AI accessible to a broad audience. Clement Delangue leads a passionate team that aims to increase transparency in the ecosystem and promote trustworthiness in AI applications. He celebrated the vast turnout at the meetup, remarking “What started with a tweet might lead to the biggest AI meetup in history.”
Currently, there is an ever-mounting debate around the future of AI and whether large language models (LLMs) should be proprietary and commercialized or released as open-source technologies. Open-source advocates tout transparency as a key factor in ensuring the safety of AI and believe in treating LLMs as a public good. In contrast, companies demand secrecy to protect their technology and safeguard profits. This ideological tug of war has gained even more attention after the open letter circulated by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, Gary Marcus, Andrew Ng and other leading figures, calling for a six-month slowdown in large AI development.
Andrew Ng, a chief figure in machine learning and artificial intelligence, weighed in on both open source models and commercialization. When asked by VentureBeat, he voiced his admiration for the open language models that have been released while maintaining that companies should have different policies. Thus, it appears that a balance between scientific openness and corporate privacy is the ultimate way towards creating ethical AI and achieving a trustworthy world backed by AI.
Clement Delangue is a rising entrepreneur who has pioneered the open-source movement in the AI space and is a major proponent for building an inclusive future for the community. Starting out with a tweet, Delangue has gone on to host what is possibly the largest AI meetup in history and continues to lead the fight for open science and open source. With Hugging Face, he has spearheaded a surge of over 100,000 open models on the platform and gathered countless passionate AI developers together under one roof to fight the bias and create an AI of the people and for the people.
