Locator: 51666HUGGING_FACE.
Better than the Nobel Prize: three guys share in a $13-billion payday.
The story of the "Hugging Face" emoji, released in 2025, no one claiming credit for the design: link here.
x: link here.
direct to The WSJ article: link here.
From the linked article:
A trio of nerdy Frenchmen came to New York to build a sassy chatbot for teens. A decade later, their startup has grown into an artificial-intelligence platform that is a pillar of the tech ecosystem, and a linchpin in the strategy of the world’s most valuable company.
Nvidia agreed on Thursday to buy their AI company, called Hugging Face, for roughly $13 billion, doubling down on the chipmaker’s effort to challenge the dominance of proprietary AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. With the deal, Nvidia is helping foster the ecosystem Hugging Face built for so-called open-weight AI tools that can be downloaded and tweaked by anyone.
But when Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond first arrived at the Manhattan offices of venture capital fund Betaworks for its “BotCamp” startup program in the sweltering summer of 2016, their goal was more modest. They wanted to build a general-purpose chatbot that wasn’t boring like Apple’s Siri.
It was more than seven years before the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“It won’t always give you the right answer, but it will always give you a funny one,” Delangue, the chief executive, said during a demonstration that summer, in which the app traded selfies with Chaumond, the chief technology officer. “And of course, it’s always very sassy.”
The name of the app—Hugging Face—was a placeholder they had put on their application for the program, based on the title of their favorite emoji. They intended to change it later but never did.
The following spring, Thomas Wolf, a physicist turned patent lawyer, joined the founders as the chief science officer.
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Lego
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I no longer buy Lego sets. I'm maxed out.
But there are exceptions. LOL.
#11376.
