HuggingFace By the Bay + Open-Source Science

HuggingFace, the AI community company, is everywhere now. The Model Hub on HF has become a de facto community watering hole, where everyone checks in and takes the pulse of AI. Sharing models on the hub is now the standard way to share your AI work.

It hasn’t been that way for long, though. HF started as a Transformers company, providing current and reliable OSS implementation of Transformers and then all other algorithms written in a compatible OSS library form, ready to test the latest research.

I was introduced to HF by Richard Socher, an early investor and before that, the Chief Scientist at Salesforce (yay Chief Scientists!). Before that, Richard was a Stanford NLP group PhD and founder of MetaMind, and he submitted a talk about it to Scale By the Bay. Before the CFP and the conference the MetaMind was acquired by Salesforce. (The same thing, and in the same cycle happened to prediction.io, lead by Simon Chan, our speaker too, now at firsthand.vc).

We’ve invited Clem to talk at bay.area.ai, and when the conferences and meetups went online during the pandemic, he cheered us there.

Clem keynoted Scale By the Bay 2021, the last online edition, on the prophetic topic of AI ethics, when Margaret Mitchell has joined.

Since then, Open-Source Science joined BigScience, the HF initiative to bring OSS code, data and models to science, focusing specifically on democratizing LLMs. That had resulted in BLOOM.

At IBM Research, we had a strong presence at the NeurIPS 2023 conference, held in New Orleans. The PyTorch 2022 conference was colocated there by Facebook and Linux Foundation, to announce the creation of the PyTorch foundation. We connected with Thomas Wolf, speaking at NeurIPS, and the HF team presenting at the PyTorch conference. We’ve shared OSSci ideas with a dozen Huggers. And have done it again at OSS Summit North America, at the PyTorch mini-event.

And Alexy with bay.area.ai was the coorganizer of the Woodstock AI, the record-breaking meetup that brought 5,000 people to Exploratorium to see Clem and llamas and connect with the community projects!

Tim Bonnemann making his way towards Clem

5,000 AI fans in the Exploratorium

Clem talking to the attendees

Alexy with his four kids who were having fun at the Exploratorium too!

Now that IBM and HuggingFace announced the partnership around Watson X, we’re looking forward to align even better to advance the community.

As Clem always says, AI progress is made thanks to

Open Source + Open Science

— and if we factor out Open, we get Open (Source + Science)

== Open-Source Science!