Hugging Face's CEO on Open Source AI, Model Routing, and the Future of Competition

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, Orangeropic, PowerUp and AI. You're getting unfairly completed with when you're, like, the fastest growing company in the world. If anything, 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 wealth. And that's much more dangerous than them maybe losing a couple billion dollars of revenue. As Aon 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 cofounder and CEO, Clement de Long, 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 discussed GPT five, AI regulation, local models, Europe's AI ecosystem, stack. 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, gone. They were about to say the same thing. 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 it's kind of like had some sort of a to to what, what was happening. Interesting anecdote is that we we bumped into, Tom Brown there, like, the cofounder of of. And we 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 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, …