I don't understand HuggingFace's model at all. I went to try out StarCoder LLM & happily downloaded the git repo. Installed some pre-reqs. But the next step was to create a Huggingface account, to use this locally? I noped the heck out.

I came back latter to try to understand what was going on, why I'd need an account. I could find nothing helpful to tell me what was going on. I have never seen a more nebulous relationship with a company. I could be missing lots of hints, but I tried real hard to understand what's happening here & all of it felt extremely suspicious.