In the ML industry, there are two type of companies.
1/ Open source companies like huggingface (https://github.com/huggingface), explosion (https://github.com/explosion), Fast.ai that democratized access to ML and provided a set of tools & language models for engineers. These companies didn't only manage to build a company and open source projects, they built a welcoming community and it's impressive to see all these students use these tools to tackle bigger problems. That's what"democratized" mean to an engineer[1].
2/ Media companies that built ML APIs to ease the use of such services like OpenAI. I think this company falls under this category.
I believe huggingface mostly subsist on investments and the amount they earn directly is still pretty small compared to expenses, is that no longer the case?
I respectfully disagree with this statement, there is a large body of work focusing on making this easier. The HW/SW stack vary from a a company to another.
1/ Open source companies like huggingface (https://github.com/huggingface), explosion (https://github.com/explosion), Fast.ai that democratized access to ML and provided a set of tools & language models for engineers. These companies didn't only manage to build a company and open source projects, they built a welcoming community and it's impressive to see all these students use these tools to tackle bigger problems. That's what"democratized" mean to an engineer[1].
2/ Media companies that built ML APIs to ease the use of such services like OpenAI. I think this company falls under this category.
[1]: https://marksaroufim.substack.com/p/machine-learning-the-gre...