Hugging Face has begun early sale talks at a valuation of at least 13 billion dollars, while Sam Altman says users could lose influence if model control concentrates among a few companies or people.
According to SiliconANGLE, Hugging Face has hired a bank to sound out possible buyers at a valuation of at least 13 billion dollars. The talks remain at an early stage, and the report names no bidder. The company's previous funding round came in 2023, when it raised 235 million dollars at a valuation of 4.5 billion dollars in a round led by Salesforce Ventures. Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm and IBM are also among its investors.[1]
In an interview with David Senra released on Sunday, Sam Altman said he worries that AI could end up controlled by a handful of companies, models or people. The OpenAI chief executive argued that people should retain deep control over the future and that society and the models will co-evolve. He listed systems slipping free of their human handlers as a second concern, while warning that fear of that risk could push societies to trade liberty for safety.[2]
The number of open models in Hugging Face's public repository has passed 3 million, while its dataset count has passed 1 million. The company earns from paid subscriptions, enterprise hosting and compute, but does not disclose its revenue. In the same interview, Altman argued that AI is about to drive the largest wave of small-business formation yet seen. The sale sounding therefore concerns ownership of a major platform used to distribute models and datasets, while the OpenAI executive expects the number of economic relationships people form around these systems to expand.[1], [2]
