Clément Delangue is, along with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, one of the three French co-founders of Hugging Face, a leading start-up in artificial intelligence (AI). Valued at €4.2 billion after having raised nearly €450 million since its creation in 2016, this American company is known as the reference platform where developers and companies publish tools and models to make AI open source, i.e. freely accessible and modifiable.
Living between Miami, New York and Paris, where half of Hugging Face’s 220 employees are based, its CEO defends the design of an AI “open and decentralized”, against the dominance of digital giants such as OpenAI and its partner Microsoft or Google.
Hugging Face wants to “democratize good AI” – what does that mean?
AI is ethical when it is aligned with the values of the people involved in the project. At Hugging Face, our values are openness, transparency and inclusion. We are therefore thinking of ways to make the technology as open as possible, to allow companies to share their AI models and the data sets and content they have been trained on. We are also looking to prevent one company from controlling the sector. We would like everyone to be able to create their own AI: companies, but also associations and NGOs, public structures, regulators, journalists, etc.
Powerful players like Google or OpenAI offer large closed AI models, why is this a problem?
There are several complementary approaches. When you want to build a search engine, like ChatGPT, it’s good to use a very large AI model. But when you want to build a chatbot, – A chatbot: For customer service in your banking app, you don’t necessarily need an AI that talks about the meaning of life, but rather an AI that responds quickly. A smaller, specialized model is faster and allows you to spend less money and electricity, so it also emits less CO2.
Moreover, it is important that everyone who wants to build AI systems has access to the necessary resources, just as anyone can write computer code to create software. This is a more desirable world than one in which a few very large companies keep their secrets and their AI models and control access to this technology.
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