• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 25, 2024

Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) repository, has partnered with Google Cloud to let developers build, train and deploy AI models without the need to pay for a Google Cloud subscription.

"Google Cloud and Hugging Face share a vision for making generative AI more accessible and impactful for developers," Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post. "This partnership ensures that developers on Hugging Face will have access to Google Cloud's purpose-built AI platform, Vertex AI, along with our secure infrastructure, which can accelerate the next generation of AI services and applications."

The AI revolution has begun for the advertising and retail industries, and this partnership with allow developers to use Google Cloud's infrastructure for all Hugging Face services to create applications.

It also gives developers access to Google’s tensor processing units (TPU) and GPU  supercomputers, which will include thousands of Nvidia’s H100 to support AI applications.

Google, along with several other big technology companies, invested in Hugging Face’s $235 million funding round in August 2023, valuing the company at $4.5 billion. Other investors include Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Ventures, and IBM.

There are hundreds of thousands of models hosted on Hugging Face. It stores open-source foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2, and databases for training models.  

Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are custom and application-specific integrated circuits that power services like Search.

Hundreds of thousands of interconnected chips create one supercomputer to handle some of the worlds’ largest records and processing functions.

The company also uses optical circuit switch technology that allows the super computers to reconfigure themselves to scale the processing capabilities up or down as needed. 

For those who want to look into the future, Samsung this week launched a pilot program -- an AI integration to support hospitality and retail.

The company said it will install AI-powered digital screens in three high-traffic areas in Chevron gas station convenience stores in California and Washington, and retail locations.

The pilot program also introduced digital humans to assist customers in the San Diego ExtraMile store. “Sam the Sommelier,” per Samsung, is a “hyper-realistic generative AI-powered virtual being that can interact with customers via voice or live chat through an app and provide recommendations for wine pairings with their food purchases.”

Consumers will have the ability to learn about wine, take a quiz to find their ideal bottle and get immediate assistance to complete their transaction through a natural conversation with the virtual and visual assistant.