I'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
My business model was that people with great models trained on proprietary data sets would buy & sell trained weights and fine tuned models for private use.
Here is an example.
No e-commerce business is going to easily publish their sales data for everyone to train so they can build a great model for optimizing recommendations of products.
Hiring an internal AI team may have 2 problems.
- It may cost too much - May not work as well - You may not have the appropriate data set or data size (DL is very data intensive).
For a small fraction of what it may cost to hire your own team. You may buy a fine tuned models or readily trained weights that you just "plug & play".
That sounds like reasonable model.
The client (e-commerce) saves money, time, is guaranteed success, and gets the bonus productivity output from AI integration.
What do you guys think? Tarpit idea?
If I owned hugging face, I would follow such a strategy.
I remember seeing a post last week-ish from Julien Chaumond that they are profitable.
They are selling related services. Looks like data and inference offerings with per seat pricing. https://huggingface.co/pricing
Phase 1 - Launch product which loses money
Phase 2 - ???
Phase 3 - Profit!
Few have progressed past the first phase yet.