then they pivoted into the whole ai thing like many other companies and are burning money now. the usual burn money till you get bought or you close the company with the owners getting rich of secondaries and your "lessons".
edit: here is an old article https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-beco...
I have nothing to do with the company, nor do I really use their platform, but I felt a need to point something out: your statement is a pretty egregious trivialisation of huggingface and their contributions to AI. They were releasing NLP papers in early 2018, and in the same year open-sourced one of the most impactful ML libraries in the industry's history. The original chatbot app was dropped very early on and their full focus became the research, tooling, and platform.
Hugging Face first gained popularity as they provided the first PyTorch-friendly implementations of BERT and GPT-2, which later became the transformers library.
They didn't pivot to AI, they were there since the start.