Open source AI is booming, said Clem DeLang, CEO of Hugging Face. The company has grown in recent years into a kind of GitHub for AI, allowing AI builders to share and download open models and datasets, and is now used by about half of Fortune 500 companies. DeLang has seen the same story repeated over and over again. Companies start with Frontier APIs, but as they scale, cost forces them to move to an open source model.
In this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks to Delangue about why the battle between open source and closed source is important in the wake of Anthropic’s canceled release of Fable, and why he’s concerned that a few big companies could end up controlling everything.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about what’s next.
How are the majority of open models downloaded in the US produced in Chinese labs, and why does DeLange think that’s a problem worth solving, rather than a reason to distrust open source itself? How Hug Face is choosing capital efficiencies over typical Silicon Valley financing strategies, including why it turned down a major investment from Nvidia last year. Why does he think robotics is a more urgent case for open and transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given the extent to which robots will be seen in homes and family life?
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