Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue says open source AI is booming, with the company growing into something like a GitHub for AI where builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue observes that companies typically start out on frontier APIs but as they scale, costs drive them toward open source models.
Speaking on TechCrunch's Equity podcast with Rebecca Bellan, Delangue discussed concerns about a handful of big companies potentially controlling AI. He noted that Chinese labs are producing the majority of open models downloaded in the U.S., but views this as a problem worth fixing rather than a reason to distrust open source itself.
Hugging Face is choosing capital efficiency over typical Silicon Valley fundraising, having turned down a large investment from Nvidia last year. Delangue also sees robotics as an even more urgent case for open, transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given how much of a user's home and family life a robot ends up observing.