91–100 of 207 posts
I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)
> They know that money is coming right back to them. it is totally can be condition of investment round: have specific vendor as compute provider.
Hugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse. Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace? Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.
They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. I think it's important for people to diversify away from them and not build anything that uniquely depends on them. It's not good to have chokepoints like this.
Model hosting is a nice convenience, but if HF removed every single repo from GitHub tomorrow and paywalled the model repo, it wouldn't be a big deal. Maintainers would clone their models and repos to somewhere else.
Congratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative. What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.
If it wants everyone to fork its models, having the model on Huggingface and using its libraries will increase adoption, as people are used to that format, having the quantization built-in, etc. Having to perform model conversions slows things down, despite TheBloke’s constant efforts to convert every format to every other.
If the model will only be accessible through CLI, APIs, or a website UI, then custom can make sense.
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Diversify to what, though? The economics of hosting models and datasets seem to just not be great in general. For the same reasons that we can expect HF to eventually crack down on the "freeloaders", I think pretty much any other entity also will unless it's explicitly set up as a public benefit. I could see this sort of thing maybe being funded by universities or their affiliated foundations, but most companies with…
Pip, maven, npm, docker hub, apt-get, github and suchlike seem to manage to provide hefty binary downloads with no need to monetise anonymous downloads. I don't quite understand how they do so, but it seems to be possible. Everyone who downloads a 5GB stable diffusion model probably downloaded 5GB of pytorch+cuda+cudnn first.
This itself is kinda insane. In fact, it was literally untenable for PyPi, which is why (historically) installing all that was unecessarily painful.
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Do they really? As far as I can tell, diffusers/transformer are open sourced wrappers around torch implementations, there are a bunch of companies that are offering inference (just like they are), and there is some value in offering S3 storage to allow for model search. If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"
Their Git LFS based hosting is used by a lot of AI tools. Huggingface level data storage and transfer would also be VERY costly to accomplish for a small party. Some of these models are several gigabytes in size and downloaded hundreds or thousands of time per day. What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.
In fact, I think the whole community is HF averse. The two most popular frameworks are based around the Stability implemenetaion and file format, not HF diffusers.
Genuine question … What business are you in when selling AI/ML? I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”. And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML? Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell? To use an analogy, if…
They are selling picks and shovels. There will be a few huge winners in the AI space, a good amount of modest winners, and a lot of losers. They don't care who wins or loses but are happy to sell the supplies needed for anyone that wants to take a shot. If they can make it easier and worthwhile to use their product and create business value, then they will sell a lot of picks and shovels.
But what “tools” are being sold for AI/ML?
- A model isn’t a tool, that’s a purpose built offering that can be used for 1 use case. Tools are by definition, intended to help with broad/general use cases.
- Hosting isn’t a tool, it’s a commodity and lots of cloud players already occupy that space.
Please don’t take my comments as trolling, I just geninuely don’t understand what exactly is being sold that is new or unique that doesn’t already exist.
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They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. I think it's important for people to diversify away from them and not build anything that uniquely depends on them. It's not good to have chokepoints like this.
You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.
There are network effects in play here. They have a big moat purely because of their large user base.
throwaway since since i used to be affiliated with them. HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships…
Throwaway for a similar reason. I can't for the life of me understand the strategy that Clem and team have, other than raise as much money as possible just because they can. My experience with their sales teams was just absolutely awful, and it gave me no hope that they can grow ARR as soon as they need to. We practically begged them to sell us something, but it wasn't until we went elsewhere definitively that they s…