Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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When I meet with customers or speak at conferences, some questions about Hugging Face keep coming up. What does the name mean? Where does the logo come from? When did the company start? What kind of problems is it solving? How did it become so successful in such a short period of time?

All these are good questions! In this video, I’m going to answer all of them in one go and more, by taking you through the history of Hugging Face from the very early days until now, highlighting what I think are the critical steps that made Hugging Face successful.

If you’re new to Hugging Face, or if you’re not a technical person, this is a beginner-friendly introduction, so don’t be afraid to dive in. If you’re a battle-hardened Transformer grunt, you may shed a tear or two on that 0.1.1 code sample :*)

The past is glorious, and the future is open!

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Don't forget to subscribe to be notified of future videos. Follow me on Medium at julsimon.medium.com or Substack at https://julsimon.substack.com. ⭐️⭐️⭐️