Hugging Face's CEO on Open Source AI, Model Routing, and the Future of Competition
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I think distillation is a very common, you know, practice that everyone is using. It's something that everyone uses, but that is not, you know, the main reason for success. Like, if you suck, you suck with or without distillation. It's hard for me to say, like, oh, for Entropic, Pro OpenAI, you're getting unfairly competed with when you're, like, the fastest growing company in the world. Even using I think they need more competition than less competition. Yeah. Because we're heading towards a world where a few companies are completely dominating, concentrating all power, all capabilities, all
As AI models become more powerful, governments are beginning to ask new questions about safety, regulation, and who should control access to frontier technology. In this episode, Theo Jaffe and Sofia Puccini sit down with Hugging Face co founder and CEO Clement Delong to discuss why he believes open source AI is inherently safer, what Hugging Face reaching $100,000,000 in annual recurring revenue says about the business of open source, and why the next phase of AI may be defined by model routing rather than a handful of dominant frontier labs. They also discuss GPT-five, AI regulation, local m
And we are back with Clement Delong from Hugging Face, his second time on MTS. Hugging Face is basically the open source AI platform. So, Clem, welcome back to MTS.
Absolutely. Yeah. So, well, go on. I think we're about to say the same Yeah.
We were we were talking about this interesting recent piece of news where basically the government is going to restrict GBT five point six's release sort of unilaterally, basically without precedent. I don't think the government has ever asked a frontier lab not to release a model before. Certainly, a government has not asked a frontier lab to be able to oversee which customers the model is released to. This seems very unnatural. What are your takes on this?
Yeah. So it was it was funny. I was in DC last week, so I was kind of, like, had some sort of to to what what was happening. Interesting anecdote is that we we bumped into Tom Brown there, like the cofounder of of Entropicana. And were like, oh, it seems to be like a change change of staff or or or something like that before before it was made public that they they changed a little bit the people talking to to the White House there. Listen. I mean, what what I've seen, what I've I'm hearing is that there there's a
lot
of, you know, interest from from a lot of people in the in the USG to really understand the risks of of AI and take kind of like a a safe approach to the deployment of frontier models. To be honest, I can't really blame them because of the fact that, you know, the Frontier Labs were basically doing marketing for the past few years. Right? Like, if you remember, GPT two was too dangerous to release. Mhmm. Right? It was, like, what, like, four four, five years ago. And so, you know, I I I don't really blame them, for for doing things like that. I just hope that, progressively, we'll get a little
Totally. Yeah. What we were just talking about before was just like, is this could this be applied to open source companies and models in any way? Like, is there a way that the US government could come in and restrict open source companies, either practically or legally?
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