Hugging Face employee shares his path: Argilla acquisition to the smol course series
ben_burtenshaw · x · 2026-09-06
Hugging Face's benburtenshaw shares his startup-style journey: obsessing over teaching ML through dataset improvement, contributing to and joining Argilla, which HF acquired in 2024. Realizing the real gap was end-to-end project knowledge, he built the smol course chaining datasets, fine-tuning, and RL into experiments anyone could run in hours, then expanded into LLMs, reasoning models, agents, robotics, and MCP — all in service of democratizing AI through hands-on projects.
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