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Comment by enoreyes | Hacker News Reader

Hugging Face internally has a lot of very strong believers (including the exec team) in open source + decentralized approach towards AI as the only safe and productive way forward. HF is ostensibly the only place to find deep+broad resources for open source DL and transformers/diffusers are the libraries du jour of open DL.

Compute is really important for AI, and having a cloud provider align themselves with an organization which is genuinely trying to be "Open" AI is I think a positive step forward.

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Leadership is fungible,everyone has a price, and words are innevitably wind.

I would consider this a solid step in the direction agaisnt why huggingface is actually useful.

Not disagreeing with your first point, but as I see it - this only enables HF to continue to spend money on making good open source tooling + doing research on open alternatives to closed source LLMs (something sorely needed), while opening them up to more enterprise customers who primarily use AWS.

FWIW I am an ML engineer there (maybe should have disclosed earlier) and I feel pretty optimistic about the opportunities this will enable for the open source community. Maybe with the visibility into the closed door discussions I have a more positive attitude, or maybe I'm being naive.

Time will tell!

>Not disagreeing with your first point, but as I see it - this only enables HF to continue to spend money on making good open source tooling + doing research on open alternatives to closed source LLMs (something sorely needed), while opening them up to more enterprise customers who primarily use AWS.

This is the response/ justification every time. The issue is that it never goes that way.

>Time will tell!

It always does. What its shown me is that one step towards the slippery slope is enough to abandon hope for the project. Every good and useful open source project I've seen go this way inevitably turns their back on their customer and long outlives their usefulness.

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