Open source AI is booming, according toHugging FaceCEOClem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.
On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan talked toDelangueabout why the open vs closed source fight mattersin the wake ofAnthropic’shalted Fable release,and whyhe’sworried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- HowChinese labs are producingthe majority ofopen models being downloaded in the U.S., and why Delangue thinksthat’sa problem worth fixing rather than a reason to distrust open source itself.
- How Hugging Face is choosing capital efficiency over the usual Silicon Valley fundraising playbook, including why the company turned down a large investment from Nvidia last year.
- Whyhesees robotics as an even more urgent case for open, transparent AI than chatbots or coding tools, given how much of your home and family life a robot ends up seeing.
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