Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

What is Hugging Face's endgame? Becoming the GitHub for AI?

HF's CEO here! yes hopefully if we can help power good AI democratization thanks to open science and open source, we'd be happy. Do you think that's useful?

Is the huggingface website/hub API itself open-source? That would be a good place to start for people who are interested but don't know a lot about ML. Plus it's some nice goodwill gesture that helps the "brand" in the circles it's talked about.

it's not open-source as it's how we make money to fund all the rest. The huggingchat interface is fully open-source though: https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui

It’s free to use afaik so that’s good enough tbh. Most people don’t have powerful computers to run the models.

Yes. I pray for the success of open-source AI, particularly groups like HuggingFace and EleutherAI. I'm also terrified of the unfettered use-cases.

What is the thinking on paying to keep the lights on long term?

Seems quite bandwidth heavy so presumably some sort of monetization will be necessary even if following a fairly open model

That _is_ really useful! Instead of locking it down like OpenAI. I can't access it from my country.

Do you have long term plans for HF?

feel free to try https://huggingface.co/chat/ fully open-source interface for open-source chat models

I tried it and its super nice. Thanks!

What do you want Hugging face's main product/business to be?

We've been working a lot on making it easier for software engineers (instead of just ML engineers) to use the HF platform lately with features like https://twitter.com/julien_c/status/1671159691219709959 or https://twitter.com/julien_c/status/1671914057866133512

Thank you for the answer, how successful at converting casual users into paying members?

One of the biggest problems Tech companies face is sustainable scaling, I hope you can scale at a manner that allows you to stay relevant without teetering at the cliff's edge.

I think that is extremely obvious, given their interface looks 90% like github.

They are trying to branch out into training AI models and running inference themselves. But their costs for inferencing look extremely uncompetitive compared to GPU providers like coreweave.

They should talk to CentML.

Whatever it is, I really, really, really, really hope it's doesn't fall into the hands of microsoft, google or the rest. (But of course it will and enshittification ensues.)

Aren't they that already?

Get purchased by AWS ?

Getting themselves acquired, likely by Apple Inc.

facehugging

Reply on news.ycombinator.com