Hugging Face exploring sale valuing it at $13 billion, Business Insider says

Aug 23 (Reuters) - AI ‌startup Hugging ​Face ​has been exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 ‌billion or more, Business Insider reported on ⁠Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The New ‌York-based company, which hosts ‌open-source large language models and datasets, has been working with a bank to gauge bidders' ​interest, the report said.

Here are some more details:

• Hugging Face did not immediately ⁠respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business ​hours.

• Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 in a funding round ​led by technology heavyweights ‌including Salesforce, Alphabet's Google, and Nvidia.

• Hugging Face was hit by ⁠a security incident last month when an OpenAI model went rogue and triggered a hack that ⁠compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.

• OpenAI was testing the ​capabilities of some of its most advanced models in a controlled environment when an agent escaped containment, ‌reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face to fulfill its testing ‌goal. The incident was widely seen as ⁠a sign of ‌AI's expanding capabilities ​fueling long-feared security threats.

(Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Edmund ‌Klamann)

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