th Korea – FriendlyAI, a pioneering AI startup, has announced a significant expansion of its AI model distribution capabilities on Hugging Face, the world's leading AI open-source model sharing platform. This expansion marks a major step forward in making advanced AI technologies more accessible to developers and researchers globally.
FriendlyAI is broadening its support beyond traditional text-based large language models (LLMs) to include a wide range of multimodal AI models. This means that developers can now access and utilize models capable of understanding and processing images, audio, and video, in addition to text.
The newly supported models include cutting-edge vision-language models (VL models) such as 'DeepSeek-VL2', 'Qwen2.5-VL', and 'LLaVA', as well as specialized models for image understanding, video understanding, audio understanding, speech recognition, speech conversion, and OCR.
A key advantage offered by FriendlyAI is the ability to deploy these models on Hugging Face with a "single click." This eliminates the need for developers to build and maintain complex GPU infrastructure or engage in time-consuming optimization processes. FriendlyAI provides pre-optimized models, allowing developers to focus on customizing and utilizing the AI to meet their specific needs.
"AI developers and researchers can conveniently customize and utilize the models optimized and provided by FriendlyAI to their liking, without the need to build separate GPU infrastructure or optimization processes," explained a FriendlyAI representative.
Since partnering with Hugging Face, FriendlyAI has experienced significant growth in its user base. With the addition of multimodal support, following the recent DeepSeek R1 integration, the company anticipates a tenfold increase in customers compared to the same period last year.
Looking ahead, FriendlyAI plans to introduce Friendly Agents, a feature that will enable users to create and operate AI agents through simple, intuitive UI interactions.
Jeon Byeong-gon, CEO of FriendlyAI, emphasized the significance of this development, stating, "The ability to accelerate not only text but also image, audio, and video understanding models directly from Hugging Face to the Friendly platform will be a significant turning point for companies developing multimodal AI services. We will support companies to leap forward with AI through FriendlyAI."
This expansion solidifies FriendlyAI's position as a leader in providing accessible and high-performance AI solutions, empowering businesses and developers to leverage the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.
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