Can Hugging Face Become an Ed-Tech Company for AI? 🔥🔥🔥
The AI community building the future, must scale into AI education.
Hey Guys,
Recently I’m a bit obsessed with the potential of Hugging Face to democratize A.I. with their army of volunteers and people who work in Tech trying to make it so.
The BLOOM model has been proposed with its various versions through the BigScience Workshop. BigScience is inspired by other open science initiatives where researchers have pooled their time and resources to collectively achieve a higher impact. However what I’m noticing is Hugging Face’s potential to get more into course building and education.
Recently I made my most engaged Tweet on my new account ever and it was on this very topic. It was about a course on Transformers in industrial settings, in collaboration with Sphere.
Sphere is a corporate education platform, but I think Hugging Face should build its own that has a focus on A.I and machine learning.
There is some indication Hugging Face would be able to pull it off:
While the YouTube of Hugging Face only has 15k followers, as Violette says, given that machine learning will make up the overwhelming majority of software development and that non-technical people will be exposed to AI systems more and more, one of the main challenges of AI is adapting and enhancing employee skills.
So I totally agree, if indeed the mission of Hugging Face is to democratize good ML: education is a crucial part of it. Building more courses on specialized fields in machine learning with partners like Sphere and others is going to continue.
Hugging Face is the appropriate brand to venture more into Ed-Tech for the democratization of A.I. and its other cohorts. Sphere only has 4 million in funding, perhaps Hugging Face could acquire them and get started building A.I. resources faster.
Hugging Face has a goal to teach ML to 5 million people by 2023. It is also becoming necessary to support teaching staff in proactively taking AI's ethical and critical issues into account. Since Hugging Face has such an emphasis on A.I. ethics, this is the kind of company that I’d trust to build such a community.
Ed-Tech as the intersection of machine learning is going to become pretty important. And it should not be in the hands of any one corporation like Microsoft, Google, Amazon or another. It should be more a community and volunteer endeavor.
As an open-source company democratizing machine learning, Hugging Face believes it is essential to educate people from all backgrounds worldwide. I think it needs to accelerate these plans and become more of an Ed-Tech platform directly with courses and a MOOC online framework.
Education for All
If you are an AI community building the future, you literally have to do this. Hugging Face does have a good introductory course. launched the ML demo.cratization tour in March 2022, where experts from Hugging Face taught hands-on classes on Building Machine Learning Collaboratively to more than 1000 students from 16 countries.
Their intro course is a nice on-ramp. Their course will teach you about natural language processing (NLP) using libraries from the Hugging Face ecosystem — 🤗 Transformers, 🤗 Datasets, 🤗 Tokenizers, and 🤗 Accelerate — as well as the Hugging Face Hub. It’s completely free and without ads.
So clearly Hugging Face have been thinking about this, but what can they do to achieve scale? Hugging Face have raised $160 million to date, now with their rising brand reputation they are in a fairly good position.
As of May, 2022 they had a $2 Billion valuation. In their recent Series C, Lux Capital led the round, with Sequoia and Coatue investing in the company for the first time. This is a very promising indication as well as the Bloom language model.
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I blogged about this before:
Hugging Face needs to create better YouTube material and it needs to acquire a company like Sphere. Even with an army of volunteers they need to do better. They need to expand into not just machine learning, but data science, programming and related topics to help build and foster the engineers of the future, all with an embedded A.I. ethics and democratization values in the courses.
What do you think?
Hugging Face says they have 🗣️ a goal to make the potential and limitations of machine learning understandable to everyone. I want to see it happen.
They believe that doing so will help evolve the field in a direction where the application of these technologies will lead to net benefits for society as a whole. There’s a lot of hype around A.I. for good these days in the 2020s. Recently I’ve also been looking at the Allen Institute for AI and its mission statement more closely. However they have a strong Microsoft connection.
We need companies and communities around the democratization of A.I. that are more free from corporate lobbyists and interests. Even as those firms themselves have their own AI for Good movement. Certainly Google and Microsoft among others do have legit education around A.I. and some of their employees may care about A.I. ethics.
Hugging Face says 🗣️ they want to lower the barrier to becoming a machine learning engineer by providing online courses, hands-on workshops, and other innovative techniques. But they should be doing even more in this regard as Ed-Tech is taking off.
Despite a short life, Hugging Face has had an interesting evolution. What would it take for Hugging Face to truly fulfil its potential? Named after the popular emoji, Hugging Face was founded by Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond in 2016. What started as a chatbot company, has transformed into an open-source provider of NLP technologies to companies. Six years later Hugging Face is maturing fast.
Hugging Face is definately positive for the future of machine learning.
But it could be so much more!
Thanks for reading!