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The Hugging Face website on a smartphone arranged in New York, Aug. 17, 2023.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Hugging Face, an AI firm based in New York, has raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation from some of technology’s biggest companies.

Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm all contributed to the round, the company said. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the funds are to be focused on hiring talent to be competitive in the artificial intelligence space.

Startups working on AI models have reached high valuations as big companies and venture capitalists seek to plow money in the recent AI boom, which kicked off last year when Microsoft-backed OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot.

Hugging Face’s big valuation and crop of prominent backers reflect how a more collaborative approach to building AI has been gaining steam in recent months, especially after Facebook parent Meta released its Llama large language model, which is free to use for the vast majority of companies.

Other highly valued AI startups, like OpenAI or Cohere, work on the technology directly and guard the results as a trade secret, then charge customers to access them through application programming interfaces, or AIs.

But Hugging Face produces a platform where AI developers can share code, models, data sets, and use the company’s developer tools to get open-source artificial intelligence models running more easily. In particular, Hugging Face often hosts weights, or large files with lists of numbers, which are the heart of most modern AI models.

While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their weights. It also develops a series of software tools called libraries that allow users to get models working quickly, to clean up large datasets, or to evaluate their performance. It also hosts some AI models in a web interface so end users can experiment with them.

It’s similar in theme and practice to code-repository GitHub (which Microsoft acquired in 2018), where coders from around the world post their projects while they’re working on them.

Hugging Face endorses the belief that most companies working with AI will want to develop their own models or technology, and will need tools to do so, co-founder and CEO Delangue told CNBC. He hopes that AI developers will rely on Hugging Face on a daily basis to get their work done.

One reason the big companies are investing: Their employees are actively using the platform, he said.

“AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day,” Delangue said. He predicted that the number of software developers working with AI models would grow in the coming years.

“Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” he said.

Although most attention in recent weeks has been on so-called large language models like ChatGPT or Llama that focus on generating text, Hugging Face hosts any AI model, including ones that generate music or images, translate languages, or identify objects inside images. Hugging Face hosts 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 data sets, and has 10,000 paying customers, the company said.

Delangue told CNBC he had recently played with IDEFICS, which allows users to upload an image and ask questions about it. He also mentioned Seamless M4T, a translation model from Facebook, as well as Llama2, Facebook’s language model.

CNBC/Screenshot

What’s with the funny name?

Hugging Face is named after an emoji, the hugging face, a smiley face framed by two open hands.

The name and logo date back to the company’s founding. Hugging Face was originally a iPhone chatbot app, but when the company open-sourced some its machine-learning code, it realized that it was catching on with AI developers, and pivoted toward that.

“When we started the company, with my co founders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, we joked that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter ticker,” Delangue said.

“Maybe during this round we should start our lobbying exercise with the Nadsaq for them to allow us to use emojis on their board,” he quipped.

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Huawei reclaims No. 1 smartphone spot in China — and Apple returns to growth

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Huawei reclaims No. 1 smartphone spot in China — and Apple returns to growth

The Huawei flagship store and the Apple flagship store at Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street in Shanghai, China, Sept. 2, 2024.

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Huawei reclaimed the top spot in China’s smartphone market in the second quarter of the year, while Apple returned to growth in the country — one of its most critical markets — data released by technology market analyst firm Canalys showed on Monday.

Huawei shipped 12.2 million smartphones in China in the three months ended June, a rise of 15% year on year — equating to 18% market share. It’s the first time Huawei has been the biggest player by market share in China since the first quarter of 2024, according to Canalys.

Apple, meanwhile, shipped 10.1 million smartphones in the quarter in China, up 4% year on year and ranking fifth. It is the first time Apple has recorded growth in China since the fourth quarter of 2023, Canalys said.

Shipments represent the number of devices sent to retailers. They do no equate directly to sales but are a gauge of demand.

The numbers come ahead of Apple’s quarterly earnings release this week, with investors watching the company’s performance in China, a market where the Cupertino giant has faced significant challenges, including intense competition from Huawei and other local players such as Xiaomi.

Huawei, which made a comeback at the end of 2023 after its smartphone business was crippled by U.S. sanctions, has eaten away at Apple’s share.

Apple’s return to growth in China will be a welcome sign for investors. The U.S. tech giant “strategically adjusted its pricing” for the iPhone 16 series in China, which helped it grow, Canalys said. Chinese e-commerce firms discounted Apple’s iPhone 16 models during the quarter. And Apple itself also increased trade-in prices for some iPhone models.

Canalys’ numbers back up figures released by Counterpoint Research earlier this month showing Apple’s return to growth in China.

Shares of Apple have fallen around 14.5% this year, partly on concerns over China and geopolitical headwinds.

Key questions for Apple ahead of earnings

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened Apple with tariffs and urged CEO Tim Cook to manufacture iPhones in America, a move experts have said would be near impossible.

Meanwhile, competition in China has intensified. Huawei has aggressively launched various smartphones in the past year and has started to roll out HarmonyOS 5, its self-developed operating system, across various devices. It is a rival to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

“This move is expected to accelerate the expansion of its independent ecosystem’s user base, while also placing greater demands on system compatibility and user experience,” Lucas Zhong, analyst at Canalys, said in a press release.

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Alibaba to launch AI-powered glasses creating a Chinese rival to Meta

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Alibaba to launch AI-powered glasses creating a Chinese rival to Meta

Alibaba announced plans to release a pair of smart glasses powered by its AI models. The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s first foray into the smart glasses product category.

Alibaba

Alibaba on Monday unveiled a pair of smart glasses powered by its artificial intelligence models, marking the Chinese firm’s first foray into the product category.

The e-commerce giant said the Quark AI Glasses will be launched in China by the end of 2025 with hardware powered by the firm’s Qwen large language model and its advanced AI assistant called Quark.

The Hangzhou, headquartered company is one of the leaders in China’s AI space, aggressively launching new models with capabilities that compete with Western counterparts like OpenAI.

Many tech companies see wearables, specifically glasses, as the next frontier in computing alongside the smartphone. Quark, which was updated this year, is currently available as an app in China. Alibaba is stepping into the hardware game as a way to distribute the app more widely.

The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s answer to Meta’s smart glasses that were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban. The Chinese tech giant will also now compete with Chinese consumer electronics player Xiaomi who this year released its own AI glasses.

Why Meta and Snap think AR glasses will be the future of computing

Alibaba said its glasses will support hands-free calling, music streaming, real-time language translation, and meeting transcription. The glasses also feature a built-in camera.

Alibaba owns a range of different services in China from mapping to an online travel agent. Its affiliate company Ant Group also runs the widely-used Alipay mobile service. Alibaba said users will be able to use a navigation service via the glasses, pay with Alipay and compare prices on Taobao, its China e-commerce platform.

The firm has yet to release other details such as the price and technical specifications.

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Samsung Electronics signs $16.5 billion chip-supply contract in boost to foundry business; shares rise

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Samsung Electronics signs .5 billion chip-supply contract in boost to foundry business; shares rise

A Samsung flag flies outside the company office in Seoul, South Korea on February 05, 2024.

Chung Sung-jun | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Samsung Electronics has entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to a major company, a regulatory filing by the South Korean company showed Monday.  

The memory chipmaker, which did not name the counterparty, mentioned in its filing that the effective start date of the contract was July 26, 2024 — receipt of orders — and its end date was Dec. 31, 2033.

Samsung declined to comment on details regarding the counterparty.

The company said that details of the deal, including the name of the counterparty, will not be disclosed until the end of 2033, citing a request from the second party “to protect trade secrets,” according to a Google translation of the filing in Korean.

“Since the main contents of the contract have been not been disclosed due to the need to maintain business confidentiality, investors are advised to invest carefully considering the possibility of changes or termination of the contract,” the company said. Its shares were up nearly 3% in early trading.

Local South Korean media outlets have said that American chip firm Qualcomm could potentially place an order for Samsung’s 2 nanometer chips.

While Qualcomm is a possibility, given its potential 2 nanometer project with Samsung, Tesla seems the more probable customer, Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group, told CNBC

Samsung’s foundry service manufactures chips based on designs provided by other companies. It is the second largest provider of foundry services globally, behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The company said in April that it was aiming for its foundry business to start mass production of its next-generation 2 nanometer and secure major orders for the advanced product. In semiconductor technology, smaller nanometer sizes signify more compact transistor designs, which lead to greater processing power and efficiency.

Samsung, which is set to deliver earnings on Thursday, expects its second-quarter profit to more than halve. An analyst previously told CNBC that the disappointing forecast was due to weak orders for its foundry business and as the company has struggled to capture AI demand for its memory business.

The company has fallen behind competitors SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory used in AI chipsets.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has become the main supplier of these chips to American AI behemoth Nvidia. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

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