IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been outspoken about how A.I. will transform business. Earlier this year, he wrote for Fortune commentary that employees should work “hand in hand” with A.I., and months later he moved to freeze hiring given rapid advancements in the tech. At the same time, he predicted that A.I. could take over 30% to 50% of such rote jobs, even contending that A.I. could even do them better than humans could. And now he’s put his money where his mouth is, with IBM piling into a massive $235 million funding round for the $4.5 billion A.I. unicorn Hugging Face. And it’s not Krishna’s first tie-up with the popular open-source startup, either.
On Friday, IBM announced it was participating in the $235 million Series D funding round for New York–based Hugging Face, the popular library of open-source machine learning models that have contributed greatly to the technology’s popularity as of late.
