Definition: Hugging Face

(Hugging Face, Inc., New York, NY) Founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs to develop a chatbot for teenagers, Hugging Face became the leading repository of AI models, training data and cloud computing support. In 2026, NVIDIA acquired the company.

Using Git-based code repositories and version control, Hugging Face hosts thousands of language models and training datasets, along with libraries and documentation. It also offers cloud-based inference computing by the hour. Known as the "GitHub for AI," the Hugging Face website calls it "the platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets and applications. See AI model and GitHub.

This Is a Hugging Face

There had to be a reason for the unusual name, and there was. The name of the company was taken from the hugging face emoji.