AI Grew Up on Git, Part 3: The GitHub of Weights
Hugging Face copied GitHub’s playbook and aimed it at the one file GitHub could never hold: the model weight, a gigabyte of numbers Git was built to reject.
This is AI Grew Up on Git, a series on the infrastructure that raised artificial intelligence and what AI is now doing to it. Across eight parts it traces how Git and GitHub set the speed and shape of modern AI, and teaches you to read and use Git along the way.
The company that now holds most of the world’s open AI models began life as an app for lonely teenagers.
In 2016, three French founders started a company in New York around a chatbot. The chatbot was meant to be a kind of digital best friend, an AI you could text when you were bored or sad, aimed squarely at teenagers, and they named the whole thing after the emoji with the smiling face and the two open hands, the one people use to mean a hug. It was earnest and a little strange, and for a while it worked. At its peak the app had something like a hundred thousand people opening it every day, and over its life its users exchanged more than a billion messages with it.
And it went nowhere. The founders kept improving the natural-language technology underneath, making the bot better at understanding and answering, and the improvements did not move the numbers that mattered. Better answers did not make teenagers stay. The app was moderately loved and structurally stuck, the way a lot of consumer apps are, and by the standard story of startups it should have quietly died.
What happened instead is one of the more consequential accidents in the recent history of AI, and to see why it matters you have to know who these three people were.
