·
Lab Leaders & Founders
Julien Chaumond
Co-founder & CTO |Hugging Face
Co-founded Hugging Face and led development of the Transformers library and Hub, building the central platform for open-source AI with 1M+ hosted models.
Biography
Deep Research
Julien Chaumond is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI platform often called 'the GitHub of machine learning.' He co-founded the company in 2016 with Clement Delangue (CEO) and Thomas Wolf (CSO), initially as a chatbot for teenagers before pivoting in 2018 to building open-source ML infrastructure. Under his technical leadership, Hugging Face created the Transformers library (158k+ GitHub stars), the Hugging Face Hub (hosting 1M+ models, 300k+ datasets, and 300k+ Spaces), and helped launch the BigScience initiative that produced BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access multilingual language model. Chaumond studied Applied Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique (2003-2006), Computer Science at Telecom Paris (2006), and earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stanford University (2006-2007). Before Hugging Face, he co-founded Glose (a social reading app), served as an advisor to the French Deputy Minister for Digital Affairs, and worked at Stupeflix and Corps des Telecommunications. Hugging Face raised $235M in its Series D at a $4.5B valuation in August 2023, with investors including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. The company reached $130M+ annual revenue by late 2024. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Chaumond continues to champion open-source AI, on-device inference, and community-driven ML development.
Open Source AITransformer ArchitectureModel Hub & DistributionOn-Device InferenceAI DemocratizationProduction ML InfrastructureMultilingual Language ModelsRobotics & Embodied AIInference OptimizationCommunity-Driven ML
Timeline
19 Research19 total
2025
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2016
2013
2013-01Research
Co-founded Glose, a social reading app, as CTO2007
Key Contributions
Hugging Face Transformers
Co-created the most popular ML framework (158k+ GitHub stars), providing a unified API for thousands of pretrained models across NLP, vision, audio, and multimodal tasks.
Hugging Face Hub
Architected the git-based platform hosting 1M+ models, 300k+ datasets, and 300k+ Spaces, becoming the central distribution layer for open-source AI.
BigScience / BLOOM
Co-launched the BigScience workshop that brought 1,200+ researchers across 39 countries together to train BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access multilingual language model.
Swift CoreML Transformers
Pioneered on-device transformer inference on Apple platforms by building Swift Core ML implementations of GPT-2, BERT, and DistilBERT.
HuggingChat
Launched the first major open-source alternative to ChatGPT, powered by community-built open models.
Inference Endpoints & Optimization
Led development of production inference infrastructure including ONNX optimization, serverless GPU endpoints, and sub-millisecond latency for BERT-scale models.
Tiny Agents
Published a minimalist 50-line JavaScript agent implementation demonstrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration with Hugging Face models.
Notable Quotes
“
Some people said that closed APIs were winning... but we will never give up the fight for open source AI.
“
The intersection of open source, open science, and machine learning is going to be incredibly successful and it's going to bring life to a new generation of open-source-type companies.
“
Language is the API to humans right? Between humans. It's what you use to communicate.
“
If you manage to achieve a cost-effective way of reaching a few milliseconds inference times at scale on BERT size models, there's pretty much no reason not to put them into production.
“
Machine learning is going to be one way to make software engineering more accessible. So anyone can start building stuff no matter where they are.
“
Democratization of AI will be one of the biggest achievements for society and no single company, not even a Big Tech business, can do it alone.
15 sources(click to expand)
julien-c (Julien Chaumond) - GitHubJulien Chaumond - Hugging Face ProfileJulien Chaumond - LinkedInJulien Chaumond Bio - Clay DossierJulien Chaumond - CrunchbaseJulien Chaumond | Sequoia CapitalLarge ML Models in Production with HuggingFace CTO - DagsHubHugging Face raises $235M Series D - TechCrunchHugging Face revenue and funding - SacraHugging Face Pivot Case Study - Path to PivotHuggingChat launch - X post by Julien ChaumondBLOOM: 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model - arXivHugging Face acquires Pollen RoboticsXetHub joins Hugging FaceWho is Julien Chaumond? - Favikon
Research generated March 19, 2026
Lab Leaders & Founders/Julien Chaumond
All Profiles