Hugging Face Inc. has acquired XetHub, a startup that helps developers manage the files they create as part of artificial intelligence projects.

The companies disclosed the deal today. Hugging Face describes the acquisition as its largest to date, which suggests a price tag higher than the $10 million it spent to buy Argilla Inc. in June. The latter company developed a tool for creating AI training datasets.

Hugging Face operates a popular platform for hosting open-source machine learning projects. It stores more than 1.3 million AI models, 450,000 training datasets and other technical assets. Hugging Face counts several major tech firms among its investors including Nvidia Corp., which joined the company’s most recent $235 million funding round.

XetHub, officially XetData Inc., is Seattle-based software maker backed by $7.5 million from investors. It provides a platform that software teams can use to store the code files and other technical assets they create as part of an AI project. The platform also includes productivity features that make it easier to work with such files.

Hugging Face will integrate XetHub’s technology into its AI hosting platform. According to the company, the main goal of the initiative is to enhance the platform’s storage system.

The company keeps users’ AI models and datasets in Git, an open-source tool originally created to help developers manage their code files. It uses the tool together with another open-source technology called LFS. The latter software allows Git to store larger files than it was originally built to manage, which is necessary because AI models and datasets can take up to upwards of gigabytes of space.

Hugging Face’s Git implementation has certain limitations. When developers wish to update an AI model or dataset hosted on the company’s platform, they have to re-upload the entire file. That can take hours in the case of large AI files containing gigabytes of data.

XetHub’s platform speeds up the process by breaking up AI models and datasets into smaller chunks. When developers wish to release an update, they only have to update the specific chunks that they modified instead of the entire file. The result is a significant reduction in upload times.

The acquisition also buys Hugging Face other capabilities. XetHub’s platform includes a feature that can visualize the architecture of neural networks to make them easier to understand for developers. There are also collaboration tools that ease tasks such as editing training datasets.

“XetHub has developed technologies to enable Git to scale to TB repositories and enable teams to explore, understand and work together on large evolving datasets and models,” XetHub Chief Executive Yucheng Low and Hugging Face Chief Technology fficer Julien Chaumond wrote in a blog post.

The acquisition could also help advance Hugging Face’s commercialization efforts. The company sells a paid version of its platform, Enterprise Hub, that organizations can use to host their internal machine learning projects. XetHub’s ability to speed up file updates could help improve the user experience for Enterprise Hub customers. 

Image: Hugging Face