Organization
Hugging Face
AI platform company whose internal datasets and service credentials were accessed without authorization in the incident.
Stories on Angle
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Hugging Face, Inc., is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Hugging Face's Transformers library is built for natural language processing applications. The Hugging Face platform allows users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work. Hugging Face, Inc. was acquired by Nvidia in August 2026.
History
The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji. After open sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning.
On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model. In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters.
In February 2023, the company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that would allow Hugging Face's products to be available to AWS customers to use as the building blocks for their custom applications. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS.
In August 2023, Hugging Face said it was valued at $4.5 billion in a $235-million funding round backed by technology heavyweights, including Salesforce, Alphabet's Google and Nvidia.
In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. The initiative aimed to help startups integrate open foundation models into their products, accelerating the EU AI ecosystem. The program, based at Station F in Paris, ran from September 2024 to February 2025. Selected startups received mentoring, and access to AI models and tools and Scaleway's computing power.
On September 23, 2024, to further the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Hugging Face teamed up with Meta and UNESCO to launch a new online language translator. It was built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages.
In April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics, based in France and founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016. …
Language models
Hugging Face develops a family of small language models known as SmolLM. The original SmolLM family was released in 2024 with models containing 135 million, 360 million, and 1.7 billion parameters, designed to provide relatively capable language models that could run with limited computing resources.
SmolLM2 continued the family with 135-million, 360-million, and 1.7-billion-parameter models intended for on-device applications. SmolLM3, released in 2025, is a 3-billion-parameter multilingual language model supporting reasoning, long-context processing, and six languages.
Hugging Face has also developed SmolVLM, a family of compact vision-language models designed to process both images and text. The family includes models intended for memory-efficient and on-device use, with model weights, training recipes, and associated datasets released under the Apache License 2.0.
Software ecosystem
A number of machine learning frameworks, inference engines, and model families integrate with the Hugging Face Hub or Hugging Face software.
From the Wikipedia article Hugging Face (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).