Hugging Face Raises $15 Million to Build "Open Source Community for Conversational AI"
takyon writes:
Hugging Face raises $15 million to build open source community for cutting-edge conversational AI
Hugging Face has announced the close of a $15 million series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, as well as Betaworks and A.Capital.
New-York based Hugging Face started as a chatbot company, but then began to use Transformers, an approach to conversational AI that's become a foundation for state-of-the-art algorithms. The startup expands access to conversational AI by creating abstraction layers for developers and manufacturers to quickly adopt cutting-edge conversational AI, like Google's BERT and XLNet and OpenAI's GPT-2 or AI for edge devices. More than 1,000 companies use Hugging Face solutions today, including Microsoft's Bing.
The funding will be used to grow the Hugging Face team and continue development of an open source community for conversational AI. Efforts will include making it easier for contributors to add models to Hugging Face libraries and the release of additional open source tech, like a tokenizer.
Also at TechCrunch.
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