How data science startup Hugging Face is giving Microsoft an edge against Amazon and Google by giving Azure users easy access to its machine learning models

As the competition for capturing the machine learning industry heats up, Microsoft is turning to a popular $2 billion startup to get an edge over rivals. The creators of Azure are rolling out an integration with Hugging Face, a popular data science startup that hosts some of the most-used machine learning models, to gain a new route into companies and grow business. The startup recently raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation led by Lux Capital in a highly competitive funding round, with Addition and Sequoia participating. Microsoft is betting that Endpoints, Hugging Face's new integration, will help drastically simplify the time required to get machine learning models into place. The majority of efforts in machine learning die before seeing the light of day due to the number of people involved -- which Hugging Face is trying to drop to as small a number as possible by making it easy for a single person to share a model across the organization.