Hugging Face, the story so far

When I meet with customers or speak at conferences, some questions about Hugging Face keep coming up. What does the name mean? Where does the logo come from? When did the company start? What kind of problems is it solving? How did it become so successful in such a short period of time?
All these are good questions! In this video, I’m going to answer all of them in one go and more, by taking you through the history of Hugging Face from the very early days until now, highlighting what I think are the critical steps that made Hugging Face successful.
If you’re new to Hugging Face, or if you’re not a technical person, this is a beginner-friendly introduction, so don’t be afraid to dive in. If you’re a battle-hardened Transformer grunt, you may shed a tear or two on that 0.1.1 code sample :*)
The past is glorious, and the future is open!
⭐️⭐️⭐️ Don't forget to subscribe to be notified of future videos. Follow me on Medium at / julsimon or Substack at julsimon.substack.com. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

[@masanmola]

Finally, I found an awesome video that shares the story of Hugging Face and presents their products. Thank you for creating this!

[@juliensimonfr]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@viejoven8877]

You guys are the new OpenAI. You have made it possible for a coder without ML knowledge like myself, to dabble in this new AI revolution. Thanks !

[@juliensimonfr]

Our pleasure!

[@cybermanaudiobooks3231]

Excellent video! Your recent 'big-picture' overviews are very good. Thanks!

[@juliensimonfr]

Glad you like them!

[@mattvaloatto]

Great video Julien 🤗

[@juliensimonfr]

Thanks! 😀

[@LyuboslavPetrov]

That is the way to get me hooked. Thanks

[@juliensimonfr]

Glad you enjoy it! Feel free to head to huggingface.co/docs for much more :)

[@VishalSachdev]

Excellent overview of HF

[@juliensimonfr]

Thank you :)

[@teddybear7949]

Great video, great company, great french!

[@juliensimonfr]

Merci mon ami :)

[@robosergTV]

any chance of making a vid of how to load a custom dataset in COCO json format to huggingface for instance segmentation (e.g. Mask2Former) ? I wanted to switch to HF for a long time but fail to find a tutorial (written, docs or video) of how to actually take a very popular COCO format and load it into HF. Many other ML frameworks support COCO out of the box.

[@juliensimonfr]

huggingface.co/blog/mask2former ?

[@robosergTV]

@@juliensimonfr yes, thats the model, but I was talking about loading data in COCO format to use with M2F from HF. I figured it out already on my own, but found it weird there is no guide for doing that. COCO format is the standard for OD and segmentation datasets, I would have assumed HF would have a parser for it.

[@satsanthony4452]

Thanks for the history and the work that your company has been engaged on. Is there an AI Governance tool that your team is also developing to mitigate risks and safe use?

[@juliensimonfr]

Yes, we do quite a bit of work in this space, check out huggingface.co/spaces/society-ethics/about