Hugging Face is sharing $10 million worth of compute to help beat the big AI companies

By Kylie Robison , a senior AI reporter working with The Verge's policy and tech teams. She previously worked at Fortune Magazine and Business Insider.

Hugging Face, one of the biggest names in machine learning, is committing $10 million in free shared GPUs to help developers create new AI technologies. The goal is to help small developers, academics, and startups counter the centralization of AI advancements.

“We are lucky to be in a position where we can invest in the community,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told The Verge. Delangue said the investment is possible because Hugging Face is “profitable, or close to profitable” and recently raised $235 million in funding, valuing the company at $4.5 billion.

Delangue is concerned about AI startups’ ability to compete with the tech giants. Most significant advancements in artificial intelligence — like GPT-4, the algorithms behind Google Search, and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system — remain hidden within the confines of major tech companies. Not only are these corporations financially incentivized to keep their models proprietary, but with billions of dollars at their disposal for computational resources, they can compound those gains and race ahead of competitors, making it impossible for startups to keep up.

“If you end up with a few organizations who are dominating too much, then it’s going to be harder to fight it later on.”

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