DistilBERT

Hugging Face · 2019 · LLM · France

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Hugging Face
C · CEO & Politics: Clément Delangue — European progressive / open-source advocate
D · Date: 2019
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text
J · Jurisdiction: France
K · Key Staffers: Thomas Wolf (CSO & Co-Founder), Julien Chaumond (CTO & Co-Founder)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: LLM
N · Safety Issues: None reported
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open weights, Apache 2.0)
Q · AIDb Rating: [UNKNOWN]
R · What Makes It Special: Hugging Face's DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT base (uncased) pretrained on BERT's corpus with BERT base as the teacher; its paper reports it is 40% smaller and 60% faster while keeping 97% of BERT's language-understanding ability.
S · Stock / Status: Private ($4.5B valuation, Aug 2023; exploring a sale at $13B+ as of Aug 2026)
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: @huggingface
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights LLM from Hugging Face, released 2019.

Data completeness 85% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“DistilBERT.” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/distilbert.html