Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?
I might host 3 or 4 models that I've downloaded recently, but I won't be hosting the 50 or so that I've tried in the last two years.
But if you don't pay a host to seed it, either the host's business model won't play well with torrents, or there's no host and a torrent will rot.
And now you've recreated most of HF
It’s all about the convenience, minimising the time and effort from “looks interesting” to “running the model”.
Nvidia don’t care if you do it on their cloud, someone else’s cloud, or on your own machine - they win either way, as it further propagates the technology on which they are building their future.
Because you can't host arbitrarily large files on github, it's basically become a defacto "publish your project here" thing.
For a CN domestic equivalent take a look at Modelscope.