Hugging Face and Microsoft have announced a collaboration to democratize machine learning through open source collaboration and make the Hugging Face machine learning platform available to Microsoft Azure customers. Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure is a new service that turns Hugging Face models into scalable production solutions.
Machine Learning is assisting industries all over the world in becoming more efficient. Financial firms use text extraction to extract insights from company filings, healthcare firms use image recognition to detect diseases, e-commerce firms use recommender systems to surface relevant products, and so on. Many businesses, however, have stringent performance, security, compliance, and privacy requirements that necessitate hosting models on controlled internal infrastructure and massive engineering efforts. This makes deploying and scaling production-grade ML models extremely time-consuming and difficult, with the majority of machine learning projects never making it into production today.
Hugging Face is collaborating with Microsoft to address the growing demand for a simple off-the-shelf solution that allows businesses the freedom and control to deploy any ML model on internal infrastructure.
Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure is a simple, scalable, and secure solution for quickly deploying Hugging Face models on Azure infrastructure powered by Azure Machine Learning Services. Hugging Face Endpoints are now available in public beta in all Azure Regions that offer Azure Machine Learning Services.
"This is the start of the Hugging Face and Azure collaboration we are announcing today as we work together to bring our solutions, our machine learning platform, and our models accessible and make it easy to work with on Azure. Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure is our first solution available on the Azure Marketplace, but we are working hard to bring more Hugging Face solutions to Azure," he said. "We have recognized [the] roadblocks for deploying machine learning solutions into production and started to collaborate with Microsoft to solve the growing interest in a simple off-the-shelf solution."
About Microsoft
Microsoft is the largest software company in the world. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company, which is best known for its software products such as Microsoft Windows operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft is also well-known for its hardware products, such as the Microsoft Surface touch screen computer and the Xbox video game console series. In 2021, Microsoft collaborated with Goldman Sachs and Accenture to develop and share methods for creating software that emits less carbon dioxide when run in data centers.
About Hugging Face
Hugging Face is a company that creates social AI-powered chatbot applications. Clement Delangue and Julien Chaumond founded it in 2016. The company's main products are chatbot applications, which allow users to interact with artificial intelligence developed by the company. Hugging Face achieved this by creating its natural language processing (NLP) model called Hierarchical Multi-Task Learning (HMTL) and managing a library of pre-trained NPL models using PyTorch-Transformers.
