(BNS) Hugging Face Founder Clément Delangue

Summary

Tech Brew Ride Home – (BNS) Hugging Face Founder Clément Delangue

Episode Date: October 23, 2025
Host: Techbrew (Morning Brew)
Guest: Clément Delangue (Co-founder and CEO, Hugging Face)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Clément Delangue, founder of Hugging Face, shares the story of his entrepreneurial journey—from his early tech days in France to building one of the most influential open-source AI platforms. He discusses the startup and tech scenes in France, New York, and the US; unpacks the pivotal moments in Hugging Face’s development; and offers insights into the state and future of open-source AI globally.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Importance of Open Models and Decentralized Power

[00:26] – [01:36]

• Clément addresses the current disparity between open-source AI models in China vs. the US and the importance of democratizing model development globally, warning against the concentration of power.

  “I think we do care for reasons of concentration of power. I think ultimately we want actually not just China and the U.S. but any country to be able to produce their own AI models… to make sure that power isn't concentrated to avoid some of the biases contained in different models from different countries.”
  — Clément Delangue [01:08]

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2. Origins: Early Computing and eBay Journey

[02:02] – [07:52]

• Clément reminisces about his first computer in 1998, sharing how sibling rivalry sparked early online ventures:

  “…fighting with my siblings… because you couldn't, couldn't receive a phone call when you were, when you were on the Internet, obviously. Remember the noise of the router … we started … Internet trading, like buying on one platform, selling on another…”
  — Clément Delangue [02:34]

• Stint at eBay during business school: landed an internship after being a big seller; served as a seller advocate helping shape the mobile platform.

  “I was kind of like a little bit the seller representative in a way, like the chief of the union of the sellers, like trying to move the product into something that can make sense for more sellers.”
  — Clément Delangue [06:35]

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3. First Startups and Lessons in Community

[08:19] – [10:48]

• Founded Unishared (collaborative/open student note-sharing platform): learned about the challenges of visions vs. user behavior.

  “…it wasn't always the same people wanted to do both [collaborate and share openly]…I thought that overnight I could change kind of like everyone's behavior versus now... I've learned that you have to be more progressive...”
  — Clément Delangue [10:27]

• Lesson: Balance idealism with practical adoption and user signals.

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4. First Steps into AI: Moodstocks and Mention

[11:04] – [14:17]

• Joined Moodstocks (early computer vision startup):

  “He was calling it computer vision at the time, but it's basically AI now... you just point your phone at the product and with AI, you can recognize the product. It's like you crazy. What, what is that?”
  — Clément Delangue [12:01]

• Learned deep tech from zero:

  “For the first months, I basically understand nothing about what they're talking about.”
  — Clément Delangue [13:09]

• At Mention (social listening/alerts): First experience expanding into the US market.

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5. Moving to NYC & Meeting Hugging Face Co-founders

[14:17] – [17:31]

• Chose NYC for its international vibe and startup energy:

  “…it felt to me like the perfect merge of some of the things that I liked from Europe and some of the things that I liked from the US... I didn't only fell in love with the tech here, but also with the city really quickly.”
  — Clément Delangue [15:25]

• Already knew Hugging Face co-founders Julien & Thomas from Paris startup circles. Met Betaworks (early investor) in NYC.

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6. The Origins and Pivot of Hugging Face

[17:31] – [28:43]

• Started as an “AI Tamagotchi”/chatbot — more playful & interactive than Siri or Alexa.

  “...this is very productivity driven, you know, like, this is designed to just give you the weather... maybe there's something more interactive, something more fun.”
  — Clément Delangue [19:05]

Naming the Company:

• Hugging Face was a “joke” about IPO’ing with an emoji ticker, but fans embraced the emoji:

  “...the hugging face emoji, people start to put it everywhere…do T shirts, do the sign...”
  — Clément Delangue [20:44]

The Transformative Pivot

• Internal tooling to keep up with AI research becomes the real product.
• Thomas Wolf ports Google’s new BERT model to PyTorch “over a weekend,” shares it on Twitter, and it goes viral.

  “…Julian and I was like, okay, you know, have fun. You do you if you think it's exciting. I was barely understanding, to be honest, what it was…”
  — Clément Delangue [25:10]

• Community starts using platform to share and distribute models; this compels the pivot.

On Open Collaboration:

• Hugging Face reflects Delangue’s collaborative/open vision, like Unishared did, but for AI developers.

  “…we found the same values in Hugging Face with a different approach and different targets.”
  — Clément Delangue [28:30]

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7. Building in Tune With Community Signals

[29:03] – [31:26]

• Start from conviction & intuition, build and release, refine based on community adoption.
• Willingness to experiment with many products/libraries, knowing most won’t take off but some might.

  “Is because we have intuitions, we have ideas and then we release it for the community...some of them are going to prove useful and are going to get adoption.”
  — Clément Delangue [31:07]

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8. Navigating the Big Pivot: Investor & Team Relations

[31:31] – [33:28]

• Importance of picking open-minded, generalist investors who support pivots.
• Bring investors onboard after evidence of traction, not during early experimentation.

  “...wait to kind of like bring your investors on board when you have quite high validation and conviction that you're going to pivot...”
  — Clément Delangue [33:08]

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9. The AI “Switzerland” Approach and Hugging Face’s Business Model

[33:43] – [38:31]

• Deliberately structured cap table with many cloud/chip investors (Google, AWS, AMD, Nvidia, etc.) to maintain neutrality.

  “So instead of having one player, one investor being the biggest and representing the majority... we decided to include a lot of them.”
  — Clément Delangue [35:28]

• Business model: freemium, with open source/public core and paid enterprise features (Enterprise Hub, Private Hub, custom endpoints).
• Over 50,000 paid subscriptions; big corporate customers pay for advanced management/features.

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10. How Should AI Be Evaluated?

[38:31] – [43:03]

• No single evaluation; overreliance on leaderboards is misleading.

• Advocates a threefold approach: social validation (community likes/activity), public benchmarks (task-specific), and personal benchmarks on your own data/use case.

  “...combine these three factors, social signaling, public evaluation, and private evaluation... that's when you can take very informed decisions about what to use...”
  — Clément Delangue [41:02]

• Envisions a future where there are as many AI models as code repositories because specialization and customization will matter more than generalist APIs:

  “...our vision is that there’s going to be very much a diversity of models, the same way you have diversity of code repositories.”
  — Clément Delangue [42:16]

• Hugging Face sees a million new repositories in last 90 days—one every nine seconds.

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11. State of Open Source AI: Geopolitics, Policy, and Efficiency

[43:41] – [50:57]

• The US lags China in open source model release.
• Advocates for US policymakers: fund open datasets, distribute compute resources more equally, celebrate openness rather than fear it.

  “...I would send a signal in the US and celebrate when companies are sharing openly... we have to change a little bit our mindsets in the US and try to celebrate when companies, organizations are sharing their research...”
  — Clément Delangue [47:46]

• Open source is more energy efficient—labs don’t redundantly spend compute on the same models, as “closed” labs do.
• Predicts open source will win for cheaper, faster, more specialized models; expects “a big model for ChatGPT,” but “everything else…smaller, faster models based on open source.”
  — Clément Delangue [51:04]

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12. The AI “Bubble” and Macro Tech Trends

[51:10] – [52:33]

• AI usage among companies is solid, not “bubbly.”
• If there’s a bubble, it’s in LLM compute—massive spend to train general models, not in AI as a whole.

  “From our standpoint, the foundation in terms of usage from companies are very strong… and I think it's not going to go anywhere.”
  — Clément Delangue [51:52]

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13. Reflections on the French/European Startup Ecosystem

[53:05] – [54:23]

• Startup opportunity is growing, with Europe/French tech beginning to raise bigger rounds and scale faster (citing Mistral).
• Suggests Europe should focus on its scientific/industrial strengths (climate, fashion, luxury, etc.), not just copy the US/China.

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14. Why New York is a Great Place for AI Startups

[54:23] – [55:51]

• NYC’s diversity (people and industries) is a tech superpower, especially for “AI for x” businesses (finance, fashion, chemistry, etc.).

  “It feels like a truly international city... gives you kind of like a diversity of opinion and support in terms of domains. If I was thinking of starting a company... all these are the domains which, in my opinion, are the most exciting domains of AI.”
  — Clément Delangue [55:00]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Open Source AI’s Importance:
  “In my opinion that's one of the most important geopolitical topic of the decades. Personally I'm not in politics, but if I was a politician I would make it a priority to make sure that the US has strong open source foundations for everyone to use.” — Clément Delangue [45:03]

• On Naming Hugging Face:
  “...the first joke was, what if we're like the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter tickers...” — Clément Delangue [20:15]

• On Platform Pivot:
  “At the time, I think we get maybe a thousand likes on Twitter, which for us at the time we were like, okay, we broke the Internet. What's happening? Because of course we were kind of like random French guys not having much of visibility or recognition online.” — Clément Delangue [25:29]

• On User Behavior:
  “I learned that sometimes when you have values when you have a vision, it's important to keep it, of course, and to build a platform that makes it happen. But maybe not to go too extreme too fast, and rather help the users progressively get to the point that you'd like them to be.” — Clément Delangue [10:25]

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Notable Timestamps

• Intro/open vs closed models: [00:26]-[01:36]
• First computer/eBay work: [02:02]-[07:52]
• Unishared/startup lessons: [08:19]-[10:48]
• Moodstocks/Mention/first AI exposure: [11:04]-[14:29]
• Move to NY/founding team: [15:00]-[17:31]
• Hugging Face origin/name: [17:31]-[20:53]
• Pivot to open tools/community: [23:37]-[28:39]
• Community-driven building: [29:03]-[31:26]
• Investor pivot strategy: [31:31]-[33:43]
• Neutral ‘Switzerland’ strategy/business model: [33:43]-[38:31]
• AI evaluation philosophy: [38:56]-[43:03]
• Geopolitics of open AI: [43:41]-[50:57]
• AI market “bubble” chat: [51:10]-[52:33]
• European ecosystem/French tech: [53:05]-[54:23]
• Why NYC for AI: [54:23]-[55:51]

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Conclusion

This episode provides a deep dive into the values and strategic pivots that shaped Hugging Face into a central force for open-source AI, as well as Clément Delangue’s nuanced views on tech culture, international competition, and the importance of community-led product development. The conversation is packed with startup wisdom, global AI policy reflections, and practical advice for founders and policymakers alike.

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For listeners (and non-listeners), this summary captures the substance, stories, and spirit of the conversation, highlighting the key insights and trajectories shaping Hugging Face and open AI today.

Transcript

[WhatsApp Narrator]

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[Techbrew Host]

Learn [e-mail] Basically, how alive are US Open models so far that you're seeing? And do we actually care? Since the Chinese models seem kind of.

[Clément Delangue]

Benign so far, I think, I don't want to be too extreme, but it looks like there's way not enough open.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Source American models right now, at least not to the level of what's released from, from China.

[Clément Delangue]

And I think we, we do care for reasons of concentration of power. I think ultimately we want actually not just China and the U.S. but any.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Country to be able to produce their own AI models just the same way we want any country to be able to write its own code, you know, and write its own software to provide.

[Clément Delangue]

Choice to people to make sure that power isn't concentrated to avoid some of the biases contained in different models from different countries.

[Techbrew Host]

Clem, thanks for coming on here to talk to us today.

[Clément Delangue]

Thanks for having me.

[Techbrew Host]

So one of my favorite questions, longtime listeners will know, is what was your first computer? But I read that actually somebody said that your first computer changed your life. So I want the actual geeky model. Like what was the first computer? Either that was yours or the one that you had access to.

[Clément Delangue]

I don't, I don't remember, to be honest. I was, I was 10, it was like 1998. What I remember was obviously fighting with.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

My siblings, with four, four siblings, not.

[Clément Delangue]

Only about using it, but using it and kind of like calling your, your friends, right? Because you couldn't, couldn't receive a phone call when you were, when you were on the Internet, obviously. Remember the noise of the router when the Internet connection, the bottom would start. And we started with my brother, actually very few years, few years later we started to do some Internet trading, like buying on one platform, selling on another, which kind of like I should define some of the following challenges because at some point we became one of the biggest sellers on ebay and that led.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To me joining ebay, actually.

[Techbrew Host]

Let me get to the ebay thing in a second. But listeners might hear you grew up in France. Were you old enough to have had a Minitel access to a Minitel terminal and using that?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, we had a Minitel at home. We weren't really using it much. It was kind of like more one of these machines that you got and that you didn't end up using much except to find addresses and phone numbers.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Right.

[Clément Delangue]

We use it as kind of like a way, a way to look for, for businesses to be able to, to.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Find their addresses and phone numbers.

[Clément Delangue]

That's, that's why we were using it for.

[Techbrew Host]

Okay, so ebay and I heard, I.

[Clément Delangue]

Don'T know, maybe, maybe you can confirm or, or confirm that I heard that in, in France they spent so much money, public money into the Minitel. Right. Like almost invested more public money into the Minitel than the Internet, which ended up not being kind of like the technology that became dominant. But I always felt like it was kind of like a good way to think about how you want to define technology evolutions and how you usually want it to more designed and driven by.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Private initiatives instead of public initiatives.

[Techbrew Host]

Bottom up as opposed to top down. Yeah. By the way, to give credit to Minitel there was Teletext and there were other things at the same time. This was pre web, so it kind of was interactivity. Like when I grew up here in the States it was things like Prodigy and then eventually AOL where it had to be a service because there weren't websites, it wasn't this broader sort of ecosystem. So I'm going to give credit to Minitel and things like Teletext for that. But you're right, that's the lesson of the web, which was it was technology that was just good enough that it allowed a bottom up energy which overtook sort of the top down sort of thing.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Techbrew Host]

Okay, you mentioned ebay, you mentioned buying and selling and you hinted at the fact that you got so successful at like 17 or something like that that ebay reaches out to you.

[Clément Delangue]

No, I reach out to them because I'm like, that's a cool platform. I'm still, it's a few years later, I'm still at school, in business school.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

In France.

[Clément Delangue]

And I have you do.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

In France some sort of like a.

[Clément Delangue]

Break to do internships and I joined them then to do, to do my internship there. It was super interesting because of what.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

I was doing on ebay and I was a big seller there.

[Clément Delangue]

I was kind of like a little bit the seller representative in a way, like the chief of the union of the sellers, like trying to move the product into something that can make sense for more sellers.

[Techbrew Host]

Wait, are you saying, are you saying you're organizing like a consortium of sellers or are you saying that you're like, you're lending like your seller credibility to other sellers?

[Clément Delangue]

No, I was more kind of like trying to drive the ebay team at the time. Right. And kind of like share some insights, share some ideas about, you know, how.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To make the platform more friendly for sellers. Like for example, I remember we worked.

[Clément Delangue]

A lot on the mobile app, right. Because I felt like at the time.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It was starting to be important for.

[Clément Delangue]

Sellers to just be able to on the move, like take a picture of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

A product and be able to sell it on ebay, which wasn't that easy at the time. So I was sharing my seller insights with the rest of the ebay team to try to make the platform better.

[Techbrew Host]

All right, let's see if my research is good or bad. Ebay does though offer you a job at some point?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, yeah, as part of my internship.

[Techbrew Host]

Okay, but instead of doing that, you start to do either a series of startups projects or joining startups or projects. Right. Okay, so let me go down the list a little bit, and this might not be chronologically in order, but tell me what Unishared was.

[Clément Delangue]

So Unishat was the first startup I started myself when I was still a student. And it was like a collaborative and open platform for students. So I was still a student, kind of like frustrated that everyone was taking their notes on a piece of paper, not sharing with each other and not sharing with the world. There was some sort of like Google Docs platform. Google Docs wasn't so popular at the time where students could just take their notes together in the classroom and share them externally with whoever was, was interested in the topic. So we had some kind of like interesting things where we had people from, from Europe or from Africa who would just like start study with people from, from Harvard, from Stanford, and kind of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like collaboratively try, try to learn the same, same things.

[Clément Delangue]

That was kind of like the idea.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And the vision for Unishared.

[Techbrew Host]

Did you learn any interesting lessons about sort of bottom up, adoption and community by doing that?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, I learned that sometimes we had this vision of really convincing people to be both collaborative and open. And something interesting is that it wasn't always the same people wanted to do both. There were some students who liked to take notes collaboratively with their friends inside the classroom. Some people liked to share their notes externally to the world, but it was not necessarily kind of like the same people. So it made it harder for this kind of platform to get kind of like massive, massive adoption. So I learned that sometimes when you have values when you have a vision, it's important to keep it, of course, and to build a platform that makes it happen. But maybe not to go too extreme too fast, and rather help the users progressively get to the point that you'd.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like them to be.

[Clément Delangue]

And be a bit more pragmatic, practical, in a way, less idealistic. I think at the time I was super idealistic. And I thought that overnight I could change kind of like everyone's behavior versus now.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

I've learned that you have to be more progressive for it to happen and for it to work.

[Clément Delangue]

That's one of the many learning that.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

I had during this first venture.

[Techbrew Host]

You're saying have a vision, but also pay attention to what user behavior actually is, because that gives you signals. Yeah. What comes next? Chronological mood stocks or mention chronologically.

[Clément Delangue]

The mood stocks was before, before, just after ebay. So as mentioning at ebay, I was kind of like sent also to all the places where there was sellers. So I was at this kind of like trade show. It's kind of like a hard, hard time because all the sellers would come to me and complain about the user experience at ebay and complain about the user experience of PayPal, because PayPal was part of ebay. And at some point I have a guy who comes with like big round glasses, the very kind of like nerdy type, and he's telling me, oh, you are ebay. You just acquired a company that is doing barcodes recognition. It was called red, red, red laser. And he tells me, you don't need.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The barcodes anymore with the new technology.

[Clément Delangue]

So he was calling it computer vision at the time, but it's basically AI now. You can recognize the objects without the barcodes. You just point your phone at the product and with AI, you can recognize the product. It's like you crazy. What, what is that?

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

I've never, never heard of these kinds of things, these kinds of technologies before.

[Clément Delangue]

And after this event, I do a.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Little bit of research. I realized that these guys are quite legit. And I think two months later I joined them. After my internship at ebay, I joined them at this company called Moodstocks that.

[Clément Delangue]

Was doing computer vision, image recognition, video.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Recognition that I joined and worked for, I think a little bit over over a year.

[Techbrew Host]

Is that your first introduction to AI or machine learning and things like that?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And first introduction to, you know, what I call deep tech, really kind of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like.

[Clément Delangue]

Kind of context. When, when I joined them, I think.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

For the first, the first months, I.

[Clément Delangue]

Basically understand nothing about what they're talking about.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

At the coffee machine.

[Clément Delangue]

Really kind of like nothing, Nothing. So it forces me to kind of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like start learning a little bit about.

[Clément Delangue]

These topics and start exploring this fascinating.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

New paradigm that is AI.

[Techbrew Host]

One more real quick, a company called Mention, which is some sort of social listening startup or something.

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, it was like maybe you remember Google Alerts? So like a system that would like crawl the web and tell you when your company, your product, your name is mentioned on the web. So that's what it was doing. That's actually the startup that brought me.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To the US and to New York for the first time, because we started.

[Clément Delangue]

To have more and more users in the U.S. more and more customers in.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The U.S. and so they sent me to New York. That's when I discovered New York for the first time.

[Techbrew Host]

What year was that about?

[Clément Delangue]

I think it was like, I want.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To say 2013, something like that.

[Clément Delangue]

2013, 12 years ago.

[Techbrew Host]

So the Great Recession has passed. Tech is sort of hitting the early stages of its boom time in terms of tech eating the world and things like that. Coming from France to New York City, what was the tech sort of startup news or scene like here in New York City when you get here?

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

I felt like it was.

[Clément Delangue]

What I really liked is that it was a little bit European in some ways. Right. Like, I think when I, when I moved to New York, meeting like French entrepreneurs here, meeting British people like John.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Borswick from Betaworks.

[Clément Delangue]

It really felt to me like the perfect merge of some of the things that I liked from.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Europe and some of the things that.

[Clément Delangue]

I liked from the US Before New.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

York, I spent quite a bit of.

[Clément Delangue]

Time in San Francisco and never really.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Kind of like liked it there.

[Clément Delangue]

It felt kind of like too far from, from Europe. Not only geographically, but also philosophically in terms of culture, in terms of lifestyle. And so when I came to New York for the first time, I didn't only fell in love with the tech here, but also with the city really quickly.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

When I arrived in New York for the first time, when I felt the energy, when I felt like the busyness, when I felt all the different projects.

[Clément Delangue]

How international it is with people trying.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To make it from all over the. I really quickly realized this is a city where I want to spend time and where I want to build things. And so that's why I decided to move from, from Paris to New York, actually quitting my, my previous job to, to move to, to New York.

[Techbrew Host]

So do you meet. I'm trying to get to the hugging face founding story. Do you meet Julian and Thomas here in New York City.

[Clément Delangue]

No, I already knew them. Julien from Paris, kind of like startup cycle in Paris.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

So I already know them when I'm in New York. And it's actually, I think, after a year and a half in New York that I meet John Borswick from dataworks and I talked to him and Matt Hartman was also at the time, a partner at Betaworks.

[Clément Delangue]

And I tell them about some of our side projects with Julia that we've started building. One of them being this sort of like AI Tamagotchi. And they decided to take a chance on us. They lead our first round of funding.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And that's what makes us quit our job and focus full time on what will become Hugging Face.

[Techbrew Host]

Well, I've read it described as like an AI BFF chatbot. Maybe you can fill in the blanks here. But I do want to make note of the fact that again, there's sort of AI in the mix here.

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We start with Julian. From our passion for AI, from our intuition that it will change many things.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

About, like how you build technology, how you interact with technology.

[Clément Delangue]

And at the time you have kind of like an iteration of assistants like Siri, Alexa that gets some usage, but we use them and we're like, this is a little bit boring. Like, this is very productivity driven, you know, like, this is designed to just give you the weather.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

You know, to answer very practical productivity driven questions.

[Clément Delangue]

And we were like, you know, maybe there's something more interactive, something more fun.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Something more entertaining to build.

[Clément Delangue]

And I think that that's what resonates.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

With John and Betaworks, because of course, they've been working a lot on the intersection of media, of entertainment and technology.

[Clément Delangue]

And so that's how we start.

[Techbrew Host]

It is interesting that we're all looking at agents and chatbots now. Ten years later, everything old is new again. But can you tell me briefly, you've said it in other places. Why choosing the name Hugging Face?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, I mean, at the time, of course, we were using a lot of emojis, right? They were kind of like starting to.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Be cool and starting to be kind.

[Clément Delangue]

Of like a new carrier of meaning. And the first joke was, what if we're like the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter tickers, like when you go in the nasdaq, you have three letters.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And we're like, it'd be cool to add emojis there instead of like having these boring three letters.

[Clément Delangue]

So we're like, okay, let's pick an emoji. We're using the hugging face emoji a lot. Let's use that. Let's take that. And probably in two weeks we'll realize it's a terrible name and we're going.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To change it, right?

[Clément Delangue]

And what happens is, you know, the hugging face emoji, people start to put.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It everywhere on social networks.

[Clément Delangue]

People start to do T shirts, people.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Start to do the sign, the hugging face, hugging face sign.

[Clément Delangue]

And as a result, you know, we just keep it.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And I think today, a few years later, we realize that it really resonates with people and kind of like makes our name, our logo quite unique compared to most of the other people.

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[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Liberty Mutual Narrator]

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[Techbrew Host]

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[Techbrew Host]

All right, tell me the classic sort of pivot story here of moving away from a consumer chatbot to you decide to open source your internal tooling and focus on developers and the ecosystem around that. Tell me the story of how was that just a solution to an internal problem that you accidentally found? Was something more interesting or was that a pivot? Pivot where you're like, maybe there's something more interesting over here.

[Clément Delangue]

A mix of both, because I think that's thanks to what we were working on that we managed to do what we do, but also we stumbled into something that we didn't realize before could.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Be as big as it it became.

[Clément Delangue]

It's basically all credits goes especially at.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The beginning to Thomas, our third co.

[Clément Delangue]

Founders, Thomas Wolf, who just like one, one Friday afternoon is kind of like.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Reaching out to Julian and I and tells us, oh, I've seen this thing.

[Clément Delangue]

This research paper released by Google called Attention Is all youl Need. And they released this model called bert, right? Kind of like the first Transformers model. And he's like, but it kind of sucks because it's intensive flow and I.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Think most people will want to use Pytorch for it.

[Clément Delangue]

So I think I'm going to spend.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The weekend just like putting it from TensorFlow to PyTorch.

[Clément Delangue]

And initially, I mean, Julian and I was like, okay, you know, have fun. You know, you do you if you think it's exciting. I was barely understanding, to be honest.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

What it was or the kind of impact it could have.

[Clément Delangue]

And then on Monday, tweets, okay, I've.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Released the Pytorch implementation of bert.

[Clément Delangue]

And at the time, I think we get maybe a thousand likes on Twitter, which for us at the time we were like, okay, we broke the Internet. What's happening? Because of course we were kind of like random French guys not having much.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Of visibility or recognition online.

[Clément Delangue]

And so we realized, oh, there's something there. And so we decided to keep working on it and we added more models to the same repository. At the time, it was the founder of Mistral who were building a model called Excel. Net that was added. There was like the few months later, GPT came up from OpenAI, the first GPT that we added to the library. And really quickly scientists also joined and added their own models to the library.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And one step at a time, it became this central platform, this central library that everyone in AI was using, which led to hugging face.

[Techbrew Host]

Well, so it's like a GitHub for AI. And you're mentioning this tweet and getting all of those likes and retweets as like, hey, wait, there's something here. But do you remember a moment or a metric that made you say, oh, the platform is the product and this is what we're going to do?

[Clément Delangue]

I don't think there was a specific moment. I think it was kind of like.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Over time, progressively we grew more and more confidence. And I think the biggest validation for us was community members using it as a way to distribute their work. Right. Like seeing the first scientists using the platform to share the work.

[Clément Delangue]

You know, sometimes these scientists, they spend.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

You know, two years, three years, five years, like, refining their skills to get to the level where they can train a state of the art model.

[Clément Delangue]

And the fact that they were sharing.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It on our platform, sharing Hugging Face.

[Clément Delangue]

Link, interacting with the community on our platform, I think that's something in our.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Mind that showed us that what we.

[Clément Delangue]

Were building was useful to people, impactful.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

For people, and that it could have kind of like a big impact.

[Clément Delangue]

I think one of the things that was important for us too is I.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Mentioned some of my previous ventures, I.

[Clément Delangue]

Mentioned Uni Shared, which was open and.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Collaborative platform for students.

[Clément Delangue]

And in a way, we found the.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Same values in Hugging Face with a different approach and different targets.

[Clément Delangue]

But you can almost apply the same.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Vision and the same values because Hugging Face is of course, an open and collaborative platform for AI.

[Clément Delangue]

And so I think that's also played a big role in our excitement, in.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Our motivation and our willingness to pivot to that because we could see that our values were actually at play there in this new initiative and that we could achieve some of the impact that we wanted to achieve thanks to this.

[Techbrew Host]

Well, yeah, we kind of touched on this earlier, like getting the sort of signals from a community, right, where you have a vision, but you're watching like sort of the health of the community trending up or down. So when you do things like Radio and Spaces and other products on top of what you struck upon, to what degree as a founder, are you again, relying on signals from this community to go in the direction that you think you should go, or are you. How do you weigh your vision versus the signals you're getting from users?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, it's a tough question. Depends. Always depends, right? There's no kind of like standards, pattern or playbook for things like that. But, you know, what we learned is.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

That.

[Clément Delangue]

You want to start from a.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Conviction, from an intuition.

[Clément Delangue]

For example, Thomas, he started from the intuition that if he converted These weights to Pytorch, more people will find it.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Useful and more people will use it.

[Clément Delangue]

And then you have to make the work to build something good.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Something like actually that's aligned with your, with your intuition.

[Clément Delangue]

And then you want to release it.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And see if your intuition is confirmed.

[Clément Delangue]

Or not, and how the community adopts it and how they're helping to evolve.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It, what they're telling you to kind of like refine in the way your next generation of intuition.

[Clément Delangue]

That's why at Twinface we're releasing so many different things that sometimes people are like, oh, what does it have to do with everything else? Like, why are you building so many.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Different products, different features, different libraries?

[Clément Delangue]

Is because we have intuitions, we have ideas and then we release it for the community. And we know that most of them, maybe nobody's going to use it, or a very small number of people are going to use it, but some of them are going to prove useful and are going to get adoption.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And then we're going to double down on them and keep building on top of them.

[Techbrew Host]

Let me ask a slightly different question, which is when you do pivot and you go to a John Borthwick, one of your early investors, and you say, hey, remember we were doing this bot. But by the way, look at what's happening over here. I'm assuming nine times out of ten an investor's like, great, you're getting traction, I don't really care. But is there sort of advice that you would give for how you frame a pivot to early investors who signed on to a certain thing? Maybe they just signed on to you, but they signed on to a vision and you. And you're like, the vision is different now.

[Clément Delangue]

Well, I mean, I think first what's important is to pick investors who are open minded, more generalists and specialists, if.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

That'S what you feel like is aligned.

[Clément Delangue]

With your way of building. Right. Because obviously if you pick an investor who specialized in SaaS for legal, you can tell them you're gonna build something completely different. Even if they're open minded, it's gonna.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Be a challenge for them. Right?

[Clément Delangue]

So we were lucky that we picked investors like Betaworks that were quite generalists.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And open, open minded. And I think that's probably 99% of.

[Clément Delangue]

The of the reasons why this pivot went, went well. And then second is, you know, you're going to do a lot of different.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Experiments to get to pivot. Right. And it might not be your first experiment that is going to be the final pivot.

[Clément Delangue]

So I would wait to kind of like bring your investors on board when.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

You have quite high validation and conviction that you're going to pivot, right? Like so our investors, for example, when.

[Clément Delangue]

We came to them and we're like.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Okay, this is getting really good traction.

[Clément Delangue]

We want to focus most of our energy there, it was maybe like, you.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Know, three, four months before we started it and we had quite high conviction on this. So then it makes it easier to convince your investors that this is the way to go.

[Techbrew Host]

I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, It was like 2023. Then you raise a large round on this new vision or whatever. But what you do is there's an unusually broad syndicate of clouds and chip makers and you're sort of structuring or positioning yourself as like the Switzerland of AI, not only for your cap table, but what you're, you're front facing to the community. How can you position yourself as that where you're like, we can be friends to everybody and still be successful in our own right.

[Clément Delangue]

I mean, so in general in, in life, but also in venture, I, I tend to believe more in and trust more systems and incentives than, than people.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And I feel like if you have strong opinions in terms of what you.

[Clément Delangue]

Want to build and strong values, you want to build the right systems and.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Incentives that is going to drive you to stay consistent with these values.

[Clément Delangue]

And with hugging face, we always felt like one of the big impacts was to potentially to democratize AI, make it available to everyone, fight concentration of power.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Thanks to open source and be kind.

[Clément Delangue]

Of like a neutral part of the ecosystem. And so when we raise money, we.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Try to create that as a system.

[Clément Delangue]

So instead of having one player, one.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Investor being the biggest and representing the majority of our cap table of our.

[Clément Delangue]

Investment, we decided to include a lot of them.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Right.

[Clément Delangue]

So in our last round we probably had like all the important players at.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The time in AI, right? Like Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Nvidia, amd, Intel.

[Clément Delangue]

And we got them all and tried to kind of like incentivize them all to participate in this movement. If you look at the organizations on hugging face now, all of them are sharing an enormous amount of open models.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Open datasets with the community and really contributing to the field.

[Clément Delangue]

And at the same time, because they're all there, I feel like none of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Them is exerting too much, too much power onto us and onto the direction of the platform. So we managed to keep our neutrality and keep our position in the ecosystem, which helps us continue to drive in alignment with our values.

[Techbrew Host]

Right. Because neutrality also allows you to maintain independence where there's. You're not too tied to one big player. Can you just really briefly walk me through the business model of Hugging Face? Today you've got like enterprise hub, private hub, inference, endpoints, providers, like, what would you say is the spine of the business? This is October 2025 right now.

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah. So it's a subscriptions, Right. Like most platforms, especially with a big open source component, we have a freemium model, right. Meaning that the majority of the usage is free open source, and then small percentage of the users and usage are paid. And the paid version kind of like funds the free open source part and creates kind of like this positive cycle.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

To keep growing up.

[Clément Delangue]

The impact. So we have over 50,000 paid subscriptions on the platform now. And the big kind of contributors in terms of revenue are obviously like the biggest companies using the most AI and having, you know, thousands, thousands of users.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

In their company using hugging face. Usually they need kind of like more advanced features like user management, security, some connection with their own tech stacks. And so these are usually kind of like gold contributors to the revenue.

[Techbrew Host]

I did solicit a couple questions from folks in the AI community, and one of them is interesting to me because I think you just refreshed the leaderboards and things like that. If you could get the whole AI industry to adapt one evaluation or maybe one new evaluation or norm, what would it be?

[Clément Delangue]

It's a tough question because I think there's no one evaluation. I think today people rely too much on generalist leaderboards, which don't make so much sense. It's like if you are trying to evaluate a code base based on one generalist leaderboards, in my opinion, it doesn't really make sense for me the way to evaluate AI models.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

For example, to pick an AI model.

[Clément Delangue]

If you're an AI builder, you have to look at a range of different things. So first, it's important to realize that picking the right model, if you're an AI builder, it's an important part of your job. It's not something that you're gonna spend like a minute a day or like even an hour a day. For me, maybe 30% to 50% of the job of an AI builder is to follow what are the best models. Understand what is the best model. Understand when to train, when not to train, when to use off the shelf versus your own system. And in terms of evaluation, first you want to look at social validation. So on hugging Face, you want to look at the number of likes, you want to look at how active the community is for a model, what people.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Are saying in the community tab of.

[Clément Delangue]

The Hugging Face page about the model. Second, you want to look at public leaderboards and public evaluation. There are over 5,000 of them on.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Hugging Face that are specialized for different tasks, different use cases.

[Clément Delangue]

And then you want to evaluate the model yourself on your own data for.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Your own use case, meaning that you.

[Clément Delangue]

Want to feed it your own kind of like tests and run your own.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Benchmark for your own use cases.

[Clément Delangue]

And then when you combine these three factors, social signaling, public evaluation, and private evaluation, your own evaluation, I think that's.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

When you can take very informed decisions about what to use again, when to train a model versus use something off the shelf.

[Clément Delangue]

Ultimately, our intuition, and it's a bit.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Counterintuitive to.

[Clément Delangue]

Kind of like public perception today of AI, we believe there's going to be as many AI models as they are like code repositories today. That kind of like a generalist model for all use cases is maybe interesting to start with because it's easy, it's fast. But ultimately we think everyone will want to customize, optimize their own models for.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Their specific use case, for their specific constraints. You know, for example, some people will.

[Clément Delangue]

Want a faster model, some others don't.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Need it to be fast. Some people will want it to be.

[Clément Delangue]

Good in English, some others in French. Some people will want it to be good for text classification, others for dialogue. So, yeah, ultimately our vision is that.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

There'S going to be very much a diversity of models, the same way you have diversity of code repositories.

[Clément Delangue]

And it's kind of like validated by.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

What we're seeing on the Hugging Face platform.

[Clément Delangue]

In the last 90 days, there's been 1 million new models shared on the Hugging Face platform, model data sets and apps.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

So it's 1 million repositories.

[Clément Delangue]

So it's one new repository every nine.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Seconds these days on Hugging Face.

[Clément Delangue]

So what we're saying is that based on open source, based on open source base, people create their own data sets, optimize their own models, fine tune them, pre train them, and then kind of.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like build their use cases based on their own models versus just using a generalist API.

[Indeed Narrator]

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[Techbrew Host]

I'm going to read this next one because it ties in almost to what you were saying, but I'm going to read it directly because there's a certain question implicit here. But basically, how alive are US open models so far that you're seeing? And how. And do we actually care? Since the Chinese models seem kind of benign so far.

[Clément Delangue]

I think I want to, I don't want to be too.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Extreme, but.

[Clément Delangue]

It looks like this way.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Not enough open source American models right now, at least not to the level of what's released from China.

[Clément Delangue]

And I think we do care for reasons of concentration of power. I think ultimately we want actually not just China and the U.S. but any.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Country to be able to produce their own AI models just the same way we want any country to be able.

[Clément Delangue]

To write its own code, you know.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And write its own software to provide.

[Clément Delangue]

Choice to people to make sure that power isn't concentrated to avoid some of the biases contained in different models from different countries. So in my opinion that's one of the most important geopolitical topic of the decades. Personally I'm not in politics, but if I was a politician I would make.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It a priority to make sure that the US has strong open source foundations for everyone to use.

[Techbrew Host]

Is there a tool that you could recommend to politicians or to just folks in the American AI community? A tool or advice for. We need to grow more AI open source models here.

[Clément Delangue]

I would foster more open data initiatives and open data sets initiatives because obviously.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The more open data sets there are.

[Clément Delangue]

The easier it is for people to train and release open weights. So I would try to remove any.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Challenges to open data and open data sets.

[Clément Delangue]

I would kind of like foster more distribution of compute of infrastructure to kind of like help academic labs, you know, non profits startups to actually have access to to compute. Right.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It shouldn't be just the frontier closed source labs that have access to compute.

[Clément Delangue]

In the US because otherwise there won't.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Be as much incentives to release publicly.

[Clément Delangue]

Open open weights that would be. And then third one is that I would send a signal in the US and celebrate when companies are sharing openly. You know, like it's to me it's crazy that when like a company like Meta releases open weights with Llama that so many people are like, you know, this is too dangerous. It's like it's going to kill humanity. Why is it so reckless by sharing the models? I mean they've been Shared like a year ago, it hasn't destroyed humanity. And I think we have to change.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

A little bit our mindsets in the.

[Clément Delangue]

US and try to celebrate when companies.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Organizations are sharing their research, sharing their.

[Clément Delangue]

Models, sharing their data sets, they're actually.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Contributing to the development of the domain, of the sector, they're contributing to America.

[Clément Delangue]

And so we should celebrate that. Right? So I'd love for example to see next big open release. OpenAI, for example, released the first set of open weights this summer, maybe for the next one. Sama goes to the White House and with Trump they explain why sharing these models in the open is great for.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The world and for the us where.

[Techbrew Host]

Do you expect the open side of AI, the open models, the open source AI to lead the cutting edge of AI going forward? What is the advantage that open has that you expect will compound and be important in coming years?

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, so open is more gigawatt efficient or like energy efficient, right? Because it's one model, it's one training run that you share for everyone. Right? It's interesting right now because a lot of people are talking about energy and.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The energy race, right, between China and.

[Clément Delangue]

The U.S. people are talking, okay, there are 10 gigawatts there, 10 gigawatts there, and kind of like comparing this. But the reality is that the same gigawatts doesn't have the same impact in the US and in China, because in China, because the labs are sharing their models publicly, every lab can do different experiments, different, different run, versus in the US all the research labs, because they're closed source, they're doing the same run, right? So OpenAI is doing it's 1 gigawatts of training, entropic, 1 gigawatts XAI 1 gigawatt of exactly the same, more or less, exactly the same thing, right? So you have 3 gigawatts for nothing.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It could be one if one of them was sharing their weights.

[Clément Delangue]

So I think we're gonna see in the future that open source and open weights are important for energy efficiency. And then you're gonna see in general broadly for the economy and you're gonna see that open weights are better for.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Specialized, cheaper, faster AI. Right?

[Clément Delangue]

Like so whenever you don't need a chatgpt, right? Whenever you don't need a very generalist open ended system, like you'll, you'll see.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

That having kind of like open source.

[Clément Delangue]

Smaller, more specialized model is going to.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Be much cheaper, much faster, much easier to iterate with, much more transparent. And so I think that's where they're going to shine. I think you're going to have a.

[Clément Delangue]

World where you have a big model for ChatGPT, for Google, for these kinds of use cases, and then everything else.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Is going to be like smaller, faster models based on open source.

[Techbrew Host]

Right. This is almost a similar question where, especially on Wall street these days and maybe politicians and folks are talking about are we in an AI bubble? From the perspective of y' all at hugging face, are you kind of nonplussed about if there is or is not an AI bubble in a macro sense? Because that might not affect what you all are good at and what you all are doing.

[Clément Delangue]

Yeah, I mean, from our standpoint, the foundation in terms of usage from companies are very strong.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Right.

[Clément Delangue]

And I think it's not going to go anywhere. I think companies are really seeing the.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Value of AI right now. And this is not a bubble.

[Clément Delangue]

I think if there is a bubble, it might be on some specific subsets of AI. Right. Like you could argue that there's a bubble on LLM Compute. Right. Like this massive deals just to train.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Like very large generalist models.

[Clément Delangue]

There might be a bubble there, but for the field in general, I think.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

The foundations are quite good.

[Techbrew Host]

Right. We've talked a lot on the show about the idea that even when the dot com bubble burst, it's not like people stopped using the Internet like that. So yeah. Okay, final couple questions. I'm curious, coming from France, coming from Europe, how you feel about the startup scene and the ecosystem in Europe, whether that be specifically AI or just in general or also Europe or France, whatever you'd like to tell me about what you think about the startup ecosystem there.

[Clément Delangue]

I think the startup ecosystem is growing in France and in Europe it's getting better. I think the opportunities are growing. I think now you're starting to be able to do kinds of companies that you couldn't do before. And some example of that is.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Is mistrial. There's like managing to be to kind of like raise much more money than what we've seen before and build a.

[Clément Delangue]

Much bigger company in a much faster time frame that that used to be.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Used to be possible.

[Clément Delangue]

I think what's exciting to me is that potentially for Europe to focus on different topics than what the US is focusing on or China is focusing on. For example, they have, I think, a lot of capabilities in pure science, in.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Climate change technologies, in fashion, of course, in luxury.

[Clément Delangue]

So I think there's a way, there's.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

A way for France and Europe to have some level of impact in, in technology and grow their technology sectors.

[Techbrew Host]

Finally The New York City tech scene, specifically the AI scene. If you were someone that was interested in AI, interesting doing. Interested in doing a startup in AI right now, what would be a reason that you would suggest New York City would be a great place to start doing that?

[Clément Delangue]

I think New York is so much more diverse in terms of, like, nationality, origins. It feels like a truly international city. And so I think as the founder.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

It gives you kind of like a.

[Clément Delangue]

Diversity of opinion and support in terms of domains. If I was thinking of starting a company of like, AI for biology, AI for chemistry, AI for finance, AI for fashion, all these are the domains which, in my opinion, are the most exciting domains of AI. Right. I'm a bit bored and tired of like, the pure kind of like chatbot.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Play for AI, and I think the next steps are going to be in these different domains.

[Clément Delangue]

New York will bring you this diversity.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

And access to some of the most relevant players in these fields. So I think that's a great place to start a company.

[Techbrew Host]

Thank you, Clem, for talking to us. I really appreciate it.

[Clément Delangue (continued or co-founder Thomas Wolf)]

Thank you so much.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Clément Delangue]

I want a shark that.

[Katie Drummond]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.

[Clément Delangue]

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.

[Katie Drummond]

Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined, in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.