• The Origin (2016): Founded in New York by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf.
• The "Teen" Chatbot: Interestingly, Hugging Face didn't start as a platform for developers. It was originally an AI BFF chatbot app for teenagers.
• The Pivot: While building the chatbot, the team open-sourced the underlying code for their NLP models. The developer community went wild for it, and the founders realized the "tooling" was far more valuable than the chatbot itself.
• The Name: The name and logo come from the U+1F917 🤗 (hugging face) emoji, reflecting their mission to make AI friendly and accessible.