they started off building chatbot apps for teenagers. hugging face is this emoji -> https://emojipedia.org/hugging-face apparently teens are into this stuff.

then they pivoted into the whole ai thing like many other companies and are burning money now. the usual burn money till you get bought or you close the company with the owners getting rich of secondaries and your "lessons".

edit: here is an old article https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-beco...

> then they pivoted into the whole ai thing like many other companies

I have nothing to do with the company, nor do I really use their platform, but I felt a need to point something out: your statement is a pretty egregious trivialisation of huggingface and their contributions to AI. They were releasing NLP papers in early 2018, and in the same year open-sourced one of the most impactful ML libraries in the industry's history. The original chatbot app was dropped very early on and their full focus became the research, tooling, and platform.

> then they pivoted into the whole ai thing

Hugging Face first gained popularity as they provided the first PyTorch-friendly implementations of BERT and GPT-2, which later became the transformers library.

They didn't pivot to AI, they were there since the start.

For some models you have to accept an eula before you can download them. Hence no bittorrent.

Those aren’t legal in my country.

And that should motivate the authors to put the models on bittorrent?

Huggingface having some check box to tick before I download hasn’t stopped me yet.

Yes, because the first thing I think of is the Facehugger from Alien.

For some reason I always assumed it's a deliberate pun/reference on their part, but turns out it isn't, they named it after the emoji.

Me, too - I didn't immediately associate their logo with an emoji, but thought it was a cute-ified version of the Facehugger.

My mind always thinks facehuggers from Alien.

it's a horrific name but a decent company, it deeply annoys me to have to preface the name of a big player with a disclaimer about how stupid the name it when talking to people

Is it really a big player? It looks primarily like a download site.

Well, they're a part of the community. I don't know who wants to host petabytes of LLMs.