Hugging Face and AWS partner to make AI more accessible

Published February 21, 2023
Update on GitHub

It’s time to make AI open and accessible to all. That’s the goal of this expanded long-term strategic partnership between Hugging Face and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Together, the two leaders aim to accelerate the availability of next-generation machine learning models by making them more accessible to the machine learning community and helping developers achieve the highest performance at the lowest cost.

A new generation of open, accessible AI

Machine learning is quickly becoming embedded in all applications. As its impact on every sector of the economy comes into focus, it’s more important than ever to ensure every developer can access and assess the latest models. The partnership with AWS paves the way toward this future by making it faster and easier to build, train, and deploy the latest machine learning models in the cloud using purpose-built tools.

There have been significant advances in new Transformer and Diffuser machine learning models that process and generate text, audio, and images. However, most of these popular generative AI models are not publicly available, widening the gap of machine learning capabilities between the largest tech companies and everyone else. To counter this trend, AWS and Hugging Face are partnering to contribute next-generation models to the global AI community and democratize machine learning. Through the strategic partnership, Hugging Face will leverage AWS as a preferred cloud provider so developers in Hugging Face’s community can access AWS’s state-of-the-art tools (e.g., Amazon SageMaker, AWS Trainium, AWS Inferentia) to train, fine-tune, and deploy models on AWS. This will allow developers to further optimize the performance of their models for their specific use cases while lowering costs. Hugging Face will apply the latest in innovative research findings using Amazon SageMaker to build next-generation AI models. Together, Hugging Face and AWS are bridging the gap so the global AI community can benefit from the latest advancements in machine learning to accelerate the creation of generative AI applications.

“The future of AI is here, but it’s not evenly distributed,” said Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. “Accessibility and transparency are the keys to sharing progress and creating tools to use these new capabilities wisely and responsibly. Amazon SageMaker and AWS-designed chips will enable our team and the larger machine learning community to convert the latest research into openly reproducible models that anyone can build on.”

Collaborating to scale AI in the cloud

This expanded strategic partnership enables Hugging Face and AWS to accelerate machine learning adoption using the latest models hosted on Hugging Face with the industry-leading capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. Customers can now easily fine-tune and deploy state-of-the-art Hugging Face models in just a few clicks on Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), taking advantage of purpose-built machine learning accelerators including AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia.

“Generative AI has the potential to transform entire industries, but its cost and the required expertise puts the technology out of reach for all but a select few companies,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS. “Hugging Face and AWS are making it easier for customers to access popular machine learning models to create their own generative AI applications with the highest performance and lowest costs. This partnership demonstrates how generative AI companies and AWS can work together to put this innovative technology into the hands of more customers.”

Hugging Face has become the central hub for machine learning, with more than 100,000 free and accessible machine learning models downloaded more than 1 million times daily by researchers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. AWS is by far the most popular place to run models from the Hugging Face Hub. Since the start of our collaboration, Hugging Face on Amazon SageMaker has grown exponentially. We are experiencing an exciting renaissance with generative AI, and we're just getting started. We look forward to what the future holds for Hugging Face, AWS, and the AI community.