Gradio is joining Hugging Face!
Gradio is joining Hugging Face! By acquiring Gradio, a machine learning startup, Hugging Face will be able to offer users, developers, and data scientists the tools needed to get to high level results and create better models and tools...
Hmm, paragraphs about acquisitions like the one above are so common that an algorithm could write them. In fact, one did!! This first paragraph was written with the Acquisition Post Generator, a machine learning demo on Hugging Face Spaces. You can run it yourself in your browser: provide the names of any two companies and you'll get a reasonable-sounding start to an article announcing their acquisition!
The Acquisition Post Generator was built using our open-source Gradio library -- it is just one of our recent collaborations with Hugging Face. And I'm excited to announce that these collaborations are culminating in... 🥁 Hugging Face's acquisition of Gradio (so yes, that first paragraph might have been written by an algorithm but it's true!)
As one of the founders of Gradio, I couldn't be more excited about the next step in our journey. I still remember clearly how we started in 2019: as a PhD student at Stanford, I struggled to share a medical computer vision model with one of my collaborators, who was a doctor. I needed him to test my machine learning model, but he didn't know Python and couldn't easily run the model on his own images. I envisioned a tool that could make it super simple for machine learning engineers to build and share demos of computer vision models, which in turn would lead to better feedback and more reliable models 🔁
I recruited my talented housemates Ali Abdalla, Ali Abid, and Dawood Khan to release the first version of Gradio in 2019. We steadily expanded to cover more areas of machine learning including text, speech, and video. We found that it wasn't just researchers who needed to share machine learning models: interdisciplinary teams in industry, from startups to public companies, were building models and needed to debug them internally or showcase them externally. Gradio could help with both. Since we first released the library, more than 300,000 demos have been built with Gradio. We couldn't have done this without our community of contributors, our supportive investors, and the amazing Ahsen Khaliq who joined our company this year.
Demos and GUIs built with Gradio give the power of machine learning to more and more people because they allow non-technical users to access, use, and give feedback on models. And our acquisition by Hugging Face is the next step in this ongoing journey of accessibility. Hugging Face has already radically democratized machine learning so that any software engineer can use state-of-the-art models with a few lines of code. By working together with Hugging Face, we're taking this even further so that machine learning is accessible to literally anyone with an internet connection and a browser. With Hugging Face, we are going to keep growing Gradio and make it the best way to share your machine learning model with anyone, anywhere 🚀
In addition to the shared mission of Gradio and Hugging Face, what delights me is the team that we are joining. Hugging Face's remarkable culture of openness and innovation is well-known. Over the past few months, I've gotten to know the founders as well: they are wonderful people who genuinely care about every single person at Hugging Face and are willing to go to bat for them. On behalf of the entire Gradio team, we couldn't be more thrilled to be working with them to build the future of machine learning 🤗
Also: we are hiring!! ❤️
