Hugging Face CEO says we’re in an ‘LLM bubble,’ not an AI bubble

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue says we’re not in an AI bubble, but an “LLM bubble” — and it may be poised to pop. At an Axios event on Tuesday, the entrepreneur behind the popular AI platform and community site agreed that bubble talk is today’s “trillion-dollar question,” but said he doesn’t believe AI’s future is at risk if the bubble bursts.

Instead, as Delangue sees it, it’s large language models (LLMs) — like those powering ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chatbots — that are receiving outsized attention, and that attention may not last.

“I think we’re in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year,” explained Delangue. “But ‘LLM’ is just a subset of AI when it comes to applying AI to biology, chemistry, image, audio, [and] video. I think we’re at the beginning of it, and we’ll see much more in the next few years,” he noted.

One issue, he argued, is that LLMs aren’t the right solution for everything, and smaller, more specialized models will see increased adoption in the future.

“I think all the attention, all the focus, all the money, is concentrated into this idea that you can build one model through a bunch of compute and that is going to solve all problems for all companies and all people,” said Delangue. “I think the reality is that you’ll see in the next few months, next few years, kind of like a multiplicity of models that are more customized, specialized, that are going to solve different, different problems.”

As an example, he suggested the use case of a banking customer chatbot.

“You don’t need it to tell you about the meaning of life, right? You can use a smaller, more specialized model that is going to be cheaper, that is going to be faster, that maybe you’re going to be able to run on your infrastructure as an enterprise, and I think that is the future of AI,” Delangue pointed out.

The Hugging Face founder admitted that an LLM bubble bursting could impact his company to some extent, but noted that the AI industry is so big that it’s already diversified. That means even if a portion of the industry is overvalued, like LLMs, it’s not going to have a massive impact on the AI field itself or his business.

Plus, he noted, Hugging Face still has half of the $400 million it has raised in the bank. This cautious approach to spending represents a different strategy from what other AI companies are doing these days, especially in the LLM space.

“In AI standards, that’s called profitability because the other guys — it’s not hundreds of millions that they’re spending. It’s obviously billions of dollars,” he said.

By comparison, Hugging Face is taking a more capital-efficient approach.

“I think a lot of people right now are rushing — or maybe even panicking — and taking a really short-term approach to things. I’ve been in AI for 15 years now, so I’ve seen some of the cycles,” Delangue added. “And so we’re learning from that and trying to build a long-term, sustainable, impactful company for the world.”