How HuggingFace became AI's biggest playground

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Welcome back, Superhuman

Today, we’ll share the story of how a chatbot geared towards teenagers accidentally became the world’s top AI repository in the span of just a few years. And: Nvidia continues its shopping spree with its fifth acquisition of the year.

Today’s Insights

• HuggingFace says it’s now home to 1M AI models

• Frontier: Nvidia’s acquisition spree

• Tutorial: Virtually try on clothes with HuggingFace

• Everything else you should know today

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI-Generated Images: Table art

NEXT IN AI

Open source juggernaut HuggingFace reaches 1 million models

Imagine a toolbox so big it contains 1 million gadgets — each hand-crafted to complete a unique task. In just a few years, HuggingFace has become that toolbox for the AI industry. It’s the go-to place to host your own LLM or borrow ideas from fellow coders — and it just earned the distinction of being home to 1 million models.

How it happened: When it launched in 2016, HuggingFace aimed to build a chatbot geared toward teenagers. But soon, the company realized there was a much bigger opportunity hiding right under its nose. It pivoted to building an AI library that anyone can contribute to, democratizing access to the most powerful open-source models.

How it became so popular:

• HuggingFace started out as a place for niche developers

• But it’s steadily brought more people into the fold with an easy-to-use interface, tutorials, and forums

• From hobbyist developers to tech giants, HuggingFace says everyone is represented in its growing digital neighborhood — even beginners who don’t have a lot of coding experience

What’s inside the library? The headline-grabbing models like Llama, Mistral, Flux, and Grok are all there, but so are thousands of specialty ones geared toward real-world applications like audio classification, image generation, and everything in between.

Why it’s important: The future of AI isn’t just about creating powerful models, but about making them available and understandable to all who want to use and improve them. That collaborative approach has been so successful that open models — most recently, the Allen Institute for AI’s fully multimodal Molmo — can now go toe-to-toe with the likes of GPT-4o and Claude.

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THE AI ACADEMY

Virtually try on clothes with HuggingFace

You can try on clothes virtually with HuggingFace's Kolors Virtual Try-On tool. It's available for everyone at no cost. Here is how to access it:

1. Go to HuggingFace Kolors Virtual Try-On in the Wild space.

2. Upload a clear and front-facing full-body photo of a person in the "Person Image" section.

3. Now upload an image of a garment you want to try in the "Garment Image" section.

4. Click the "Run" button and wait a few seconds to get your virtual try-on.

FROM THE FRONTIER

Nvidia acquires its fifth startup of the year

Nvidia’s gotta catch ‘em all. The chip designer went on an acquisition frenzy this year, gobbling up five companies so far. Its latest purchase: OctoAI, a five-year-old startup that helps companies tweak their hardware so it's more customizable. It reportedly paid around $165M for the Seattle-based company.

What does Nvidia get out of it? The world’s third-largest company creates the most powerful AI chips around, but they’re only compatible with Nvidia’s own hardware, making them less friendly to industry newcomers. OctoAI’s software acts as a translator, helping Nvidia chips work with any type of infrastructure — a move that’s more accessible for smaller developers.

In general, the string of purchases shows that Nvidia wants to expand its horizons beyond GPUs. It makes sense from a talent perspective, too: Bringing on a team of highly skilled developers is much easier than recruiting each member individually.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

• Uncanny Update: Meta users may soon notice personalized, AI-generated posts appearing on their timelines, including images that feature their own likeness.

• Stay the Course: OpenAI’s CFO reportedly told employees the startup is moving forward with plans to close a funding round next week, despite a series of high-profile resignations.

• Per My Last Email: Gemini’s smart replies feature can now analyze full email threads in order to generate responses that “fully capture the intent of your message.”

🧠 Brain Food: According to a new Cambridge study, AI might have CEOs beat when it comes to things like market optimization and product design. LLMs performed significantly better in a game that challenged CEOs to keep a business afloat without being fired by a virtual board. But they didn’t excel across every task: Real-life execs were much better at dealing with unexpected events, like pandemics or market collapses.

👻 Ghost in the Machine: Some Advanced Voice mode users are reporting an unsettling glitch: When responding to a speaker, ChatGPT apparently gets mixed up and inexplicably tries to mimic their voice. One user even reported hearing what sounded like sighing and knocking in the background of his avatar’s responses.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Start the week off right

Prompt: I'm a Product Manager who is planning to [insert project information here]. It helps [insert more details on mission, goal, product-market fit, etc...]

Write a 1-pager that I can share with my engineering & design team to explain the product vision & the product components that will most likely be involved.

_{Source: Aatir Abdul Rauf / Behind Product Lines}

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Table Art

Midjourney Prompt: A beautiful wood and epoxy resin table with [insert stone here] inlay, placed in an elegant dining room with [insert color here] velvet chairs. The scene is illuminated by natural light from the window, highlighting the glossy texture of the wooden surface and the vibrant color of the [insert stone again here].
--ar 51:64 --style raw --v 6.1 --stylize 50

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team