Our Investment in Hugging Face

A seminal moment in machine learning took place on Sept 30, 2012 when a convolutional neural network called AlexNet achieved groundbreaking results in the ImageNet competition. This kicked off a race of rapidly improving computer vision models to the point where the technology outperformed humans in many tasks. These breakthroughs accelerated industries such as autonomous vehicles, consumer mobile applications, and created new multi billion dollar opportunities around computing architectures for machine learning training and inference. Natural Language Processing (NLP), another discipline of machine learning has seemed to lag behind in progress relative to computer vision. Recently NLP may have had its "ImageNet" moment due to new transformers models (e.g., GPT2 and BERT) shattering performance benchmarks.