Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Breaking down open source growth data
04:34 What’s driving the open source resurgence
08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how?
10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads
16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration
24:03 Hugging Face’s approach to legal risk
28:00 Turning down Nvidia
31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics
