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Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

What will each party gain from the contract they signed? The first few sections left me with a lot of questions.

From what I can tell, based on the later sections:

> new experiences for Google Cloud customers to easily train and deploy Hugging Face models within Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Vertex AI

I assume that means a new API field like `huggingface_model: "google/flan-t5-base"`?

> Models will be easily deployed for production on Google Cloud with Inference Endpoints

That seems to mean the GCP button which is currently disabled in the Inference "Create a new endpoint" page (https://ui.endpoints.huggingface.co) will now be enabled, which is the clearest part of the announcement.

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From vertexai inside gcp, there's a whole bunch of models that aren't just Google's (ex: yolo, llama) available in their model "garden"[1] that can be doployed relatively easily in gcp. It sounds like what's available in the model garden will be extended with what hugging face has to offer?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/start/explore-models

Google is terrified of open source AI and the only thing the people in charge understand is how to manipulate people with money, they lack other ideas or methods. So yeah, that would explain it.

They can’t be that terrified of it or they never would have open sourced TensorFlow.

They're even more terrified of torch or another framework take up the industry. As ML is a research-heavy space, getting ML researchers to use your platform has benefits.

Rational smart people would think so; but the group in charge at Google now just sees something that doesn’t have ads on it and kills it. They hit OSS hard in first round of layoffs.

But as people who only understand money they give HF a pile of cash to hedge against a FOSS risk to the balance sheet. It’s cheap insurance. Same with Claude.

Actuary tables and bank statements is all they understand, there is no technical leadership at google, accounting took over and the company only makes sense if you understand all decisions are made by the CFO.

This partnership is way too vague. I have to assume Google is just investing money into HF and getting some marketing and integrations in return. When deciding where to host models or which services to use for my startup, I have a hard time trusting GCP services though as being around for the long term. On the flip side, Azure and AWS you know will have support and staying power by their respective companies for as long as the companies are around.

GCP sometimes shuts down their own services while still supporting them for a few years while encouraging their customers to switch to partner products.

One such example is the human-in-the-loop feature of document ai.

+1, I bet it amounts to same as AWS/Microsoft: they get contact info for biz dev, a button in Inference Endpoint deployment for GCP, and mayyyyybe some custom integration to let them offer models without having a literal HF repo with the weights.

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