Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace?
Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.
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.
If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"
What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.
Rumor has it Github is actively working on something similar to HF Hub already
pick one if you are lucky. Those Fortune-12 giants can't do anything "in a heartbeat" .. listen to what that means.. nonsense
Someone utilize p2p for the love of god. Pretty sure there’s gigabytes of porn moving (freely) through the internet millions of times per day.
P2P model distribution isn't impossible, but it's a lot less interesting to many people, or they would've already spread their models through torrents in the first place.
But if HF's server code is open source it should be trivial to make one.
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.
Automatic1111 and ComfyUI implemented the SAI backend/format in the early days because thats all there was, and now they are stuck with it. The intertia is tremendous.
It seems like an odd move to me as what makes Auto1111 so appealing are the extensions and I’m assuming that breaks an awful lot of them, but what do I know?
Technology-wise, path dependency from stuff that was built out before HF diffusers were available, and on which more continues to be built in the ecosystem.
If you are doing a greenfield project that is mostly standalone, its not an issue, but for existing popular projects and the communities of satellite projects around them, the switching cost is high.
In terms of content hosting, well, a fair amount is hosted on HF, but there is a difference of content focus between CivitAI and HF, and a lot of what CivitAI hosts HF probably wouldn’t want to. Also, CivitAI has a UI focused on the narrow space of imagegen, whereas HF is more general.
On top of that HF is just hard to use for your average user. Civit.ai is just "click to download" while HF is "look here's a broken model card... you can figure it out from here".
Despite the cute logo, I think most people find that HF comes across as fairly anti-user. Despite having years doing ML related work, I still find HF a bit byzantine to navigate.
https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors https://huggingface.co/blog/safetensors-security-audit
I don't know much about it, and I think (but couldn't quickly confirm) it's open source, so your point about a fork still stands, although I don't think that solves everything. If it did, people wouldn't care that e.g. Hashicorp changed their license away from open source.
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.
[1] https://dustingram.com/articles/2021/04/14/powering-the-pyth...
python -m spacy download en-core-web-lg
etc
There are network effects in play here. They have a big moat purely because of their large user base.
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.
What Docker ended up accelerating at is reproducible development environments that tear down and spin up easily. I think this is the largest faction of docker users.
It never translated into a high volume of Docker Swarm and related sell through features materializing though.
That's what a swath of all their new paid features are focused on enterprise things like SSO, auditing etc.
For Hugging Face, they will need to have a compelling set of features that make it either hard to migrate off of or vastly preferable to other options the majority of the time.
Right now, their most compelling feature is being (mostly) free
Whilst the scale of their model hosting is impressive, the functionality seems pretty basic. The models are just BLOBs in git LFS repos, you're usually relying on knowing which users to follow, then learning the way they name their models and how that naming convention applies to the particular framework and hardware you're using.
As an example the user "TheBloke" is prolific at publishing LLM models for various hardware / framework combos, but look how little the HF interface actually helps navigate or find what you're after: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke
Also, is anybody using HF Hub in "production"? We've deployed a few LLMs now and once we've decided on a model the first thing we do is get it off HF and into our own storage ready for deployment. There seems no reason to tightly integrate HF Hub with production systems given it's a just a bunch of files you can copy and keep.
From what I gather it's mainly hosting with some maintaining of a few libraries, but then I recently starting to see they are offering lots of classes via DeepLearning platform; these lat couple of months as an AI student I've been asked to enroll into classes (temporarily for free) to assess where they are, here is the most recent example [0].
To what end, I'm not entirely sure, but I guess it's to get an overall pulse on what can be monetized and take it from there? I really think that this a low number compraed to where we were in the last few years, but ti also shows how little investment actually exists in the AI and ML space: consider that Git got bought by M$ for 7.5B and then tried cash in on it by releasing Co-Pilot and then got into legal issues as a result and then tried it's hand with Open AI and $10B.
This is starting to seem like a reversion to the mean, and AI's promise was always to lower the cost to everything it can, but I think one of the harder pills to swallow is that the traditional VC model is not really being supported after all the hype and losses.
Personally speaking, I'm thinking of moving on to Cyber Security after my finals this semester; I come from Bitcoin and the hype cycles there are something I was looking to get away from after nearly 13 years in that side of fintech.
Have been experimenting with deploying to Mac's for inference as they are cheaper and use less power. But also still deploy to a substantial amount of gpus too.
Either way I try to take connections to huggingface hub out of the equation at deployment time.
Why would a CEO give up equity if they don't need the capital? Wouldn't they prefer not to sell big chunks of flesh?
If he's not deploying it now, maybe the CEO is predicting rough times ahead and wants to de-risk for future cash flow or fundraising turbulence? Isn't that, too, a kind of negative signal? Or is this all prudent?
It's possible to structure a deal where the company has to reach a series of milestones to unlock each additional tranche of funding, but this is less common.
VC-subsidized Ubers were awesome in my mid 20s. It’s too expensive now for everyday use but I still banked all that consumer surplus.
As a counter point, GitHub has remained great for longer than expected, and has arguably improved since being bought by Microsoft.
One can hope that their example will help set the expectation for other platforms like HF
Careful not to become dependent on the free beer.
"Then collapse" - nope, then generate tens of billions of profit per quarter. Im sure the people of Hugging Face would love that
"enshittification" doesn't refer to anything at all. It's a political term meant to be used by anti-corporate causes - it doesn't have a real definition because it's a made-up word with no value other than activism.
> The word does indeed refer to something. Just because you disagree with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
That's irrelevant here. Virtually everyone would agree that the word "libtard" also refers to something, but very few would actually appreciate it being used.