The Fork · Decision Forks
The Chatbot That Failed Its Way Into Owning the Whole Field: How Hugging Face Stopped Competing With Its Users
In 2016, Hugging Face was a chatbot for bored teenagers, named after an emoji — and it worked, with 100,000 users a day. Then the founders threw it away to maintain free software they handed to their own rivals. That decision, not the chatbot, made them a $4.5 billion company.
8 min