Amazon Partners With AI Startup Hugging Face

Amazon Partners With AI Startup Hugging Face

News by Roberto Orosa
Published: February 22, 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) startup Hugging Face Inc to make its AI products readily available to Amazon cloud customers.  

This partnership would allow the cloud’s 100,000 customers to use Hugging Face’s language generation tools for their own applications through Amazon’s SageMaker program. According to Swami Sivasubramanian, a vice president at Amazon’s cloud unit, ‘BLOOM’ is a language model on AWS developed by the startup, and trained by the public supercomputer Jean Zay. 

Alternatively, Hugging Face’s custom software developers will be allowed to use Amazon’s cloud computing power and AI-centered chips. 

“This is an important, meaningful alliance... It aligns with our vision of democratizing machine learning, making it easier for all companies to build machine learning,” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue explained. 

Delangue shared that the startup is also developing an open-source rival to chatbot giants ChatGPT and Bing, which will also use AWS.  

The two companies have an estimated 1,000 shared customers, but despite the close relationship their partnership is not exclusive. This means Hugging Face will be allowed to work with other service providers in the future. 

While the two companies keep the financial details regarding their partnership undisclosed, Amazon revealed that it has not invested in the startup.  

Apart from Amazon and Hugging Face, several other cloud providers and AI companies have struck deals and partnerships. Last January, Microsoft has invested $10 billion into ChatGPT parent OpenAI, using its tech to conduct research for its search engine, Bing. Google has also invested about $400 million into Anthropic, another AI software developer.  

Because generative AI programs need to sort through large volumes of content to produce text, photos and graphics, cloud-computing services can provide them with strong computing power to yield proper outcome. 

Apart from Hugging Face, Amazon has also established partnerships with OpenAI competitor Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, which houses the language model Jurassic.  

 

Subscribe to Spotlight Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest industry news