What Is Hugging Face and What Is It Used For? (2024)

With big tech and organizations making large language models (LLM) available to the public, it is now possible to implement LLMs in a project, whether for personal or professional use. Organizations like Hugging Face have made learning and implementing LLMs much easier, all thanks to its amazing platform that provides all the tools and knowledge you need to get started.

So, what exactly is Hugging Face?

What Is Hugging Face?

Hugging Face is a company and open-source community focused on the field of artificial intelligence. Like GitHub, Hugging Face provides a platform for people to collaborate, learn, and share work in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision. At its core, Hugging Face aims to provide people with all the essential tools, libraries, and resources needed to work on NLP models for their benefit.

Before becoming a platform for AI, Hugging Face was first introduced as a chatbot in 2016 to entertain and provide emotional support for teenagers. The Hugging Face brand came from the hugging face emoji to look caring and friendly for the teens trying to chat with it. To this day, Hugging Face has kept its branding even though it switched from a chatbot app for mobile to the large community it is today.

What Is Hugging Face Used For?

Aside from providing an AI chatbot you can play with, Hugging Face serves a multitude of purposes in the reams of NLP and computer vision, such as:

1. Model Hub: The Hugging Face Model allows members to host model checkpoints for convenient storage and sharing. Members can also download pre-trained models for finetuning and use Hugging Face's Inference API to use models in a production environment.
2. Tokenizers: Hugging Face provides tokenizers to break down data into smaller units so that computers can understand and process data effectively. The platform offers tokenization libraries for multiple languages, making it easier to prepare text data as input to train or infer a model.
3. Spaces: If you are looking for a place to get new ideas for your next ML project, Hugging Face's Spaces allows members to host machine-learning applications for anyone to try. These apps can be anything from chatbots, AI comic factories, music generators, games, and code generators. With thousands of ML apps to try, you'll surely find one that piques your interest.
4. Datasets: Having a high-quality dataset is an essential part of training an effective model. Hugging Face allows members to share and download data sets for anyone to improve and use in projects.
5. Education: Hugging Face provides members with all the essential tools and assets to train and use models. This would include providing demos, use cases, documentation, and tutorials on how to use such tools and how to train models from start to finish.

Hugging Face's comprehensive set of tools has helped push it to the top of the pile.

Why Use Hugging Face?

Hugging Face has gained popularity in the machine-learning community for several reasons:

• Community and Collaboration: The open-source nature of Hugging Face provides a platform that encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing, which fosters innovation in the machine learning community.
• Accessibility: Hugging Face helps democratize NLP by providing access to pre-trained models to researchers, developers, and businesses.
• Efficiency: Provides all the necessary tools and documentation to start training and building models in one platform, reducing the complexity of model training and development.
• Professional Portfolio: You can create a professional portfolio in Hugging Face and earn a reputation, making it easier for you to get jobs related to AI model training, integration, and development.

The last point is quite interesting. With the proliferation of free-to-use AI and NLP tools, spaces like Hugging Face provide the necessary tools to learn in a competitive space.

Hugging Face Is Here to Stay

Hugging Face plays a role in the advancement and democratization of NLP technology. The platforms provide all the tools, assets, and documentation to help anyone interested in machine learning train, fine-tune, and implement models for their specific needs. Although there are other similar platforms much older than Hugging Face, its pivotal role in introducing AI technologies to the masses has cemented its spot as one of the biggest platforms for learning, collaborating, and sharing ideas about machine learning.