What Is Hugging Face and What Is It Used For? – MUO – MakeUseOf
Hugging Face has become a popular platform for the NLP community. So what it is exactly? And why do people visit the site? Let’s talk about it!
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?
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.
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:
Hugging Face's comprehensive set of tools has helped push it to the top of the pile.
Hugging Face has gained popularity in the machine-learning community for several reasons:
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 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.
Craving to learn how things worked, Jayric Maning started tinkering with all kinds of electronic and analog devices during his early teens. He took up forensic science at the University of Baguio, where he got acquainted with computer forensics and cyber security. He is currently doing lots of self-study and tinkering with tech, figuring out how it works and how we can use it to make life easier (or at least cooler!).
