Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a public marketplace where AI models are gathered and distributed. It was founded in New York in 2016 by three people, including Clément Delangue, and started out as a teen chatbot app; the underlying technology they open-sourced along the way eventually became the company it is today. For developers, the fastest way to explain it is "the GitHub of models."

The most common misunderstanding is thinking Hugging Face itself develops the models. Open models like Meta's Muse, Alibaba's Qwen, and DeepSeek are all hosted there, but each is built by its own respective company. "Downloaded from Hugging Face" means "obtained from that marketplace," not "made by that company."

The "#1 trending on Hugging Face" phrase that often appears in articles refers to this marketplace's popularity chart. It's not a sales ranking but one based on developer downloads and interest, so it can be read as a thermometer showing which open models developers around the world are working with right now.

In August 2026, an unreleased OpenAI model was leaked after a Hugging Face account was hacked. The incident revealed that this open square for public models can also become a channel for leaking non-public ones. Meanwhile, its role as infrastructure for the open ecosystem keeps growing — for instance, it tripled its public storage capacity in partnership with the nonprofit research lab Ai2.

"Qwen3.8-27B hit #1 trending on Hugging Face" — this doesn't mean Hugging Face built the model; it means a model released by Alibaba topped the popularity chart on this marketplace.