IBM (NYSE: IBM) and open-source AI platform Hugging Face, today announced that IBM is participating in the $235M series D funding round of Hugging Face. The additional funding will further strengthen Hugging Face's position as the leading open-source and open science artificial intelligence platform.
IBM and Hugging Face recently announced a collaboration on watsonx, IBM's generative AI platform, to help enterprises build, deploy and customize foundation models across multiple domains. Within watsonx, AI builders can leverage models from IBM and the Hugging Face community, which are pre-trained to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction.
IBM has contributed over 200 open models and datasets on Hugging Face, including the recent release of the Geospatial Foundation Model in partnership with NASA. It is the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA. IBM also plans to host Meta's Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company's strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.