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"
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.
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
I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”.
And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML?
Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell?
To use an analogy, if you’re selling AI/ML, are you in the IaaS industry, PaaS industry, SaaS industry (or something else?)
If they can make it easier and worthwhile to use their product and create business value, then they will sell a lot of picks and shovels.
PS - I'm optimistic about AI, but it's important to be realistic about the current state of the industry
But what “tools” are being sold for AI/ML?
- A model isn’t a tool, that’s a purpose built offering that can be used for 1 use case. Tools are by definition, intended to help with broad/general use cases.
- Hosting isn’t a tool, it’s a commodity and lots of cloud players already occupy that space.
Please don’t take my comments as trolling, I just geninuely don’t understand what exactly is being sold that is new or unique that doesn’t already exist.
a) a hardware vendor nvidia/amd whose products are needed by anyone in the game
b) you have a captive customer base already ( microsoft, salesforce, servicenow, adobe) to whom you can sell ai/ml value adds
c) you make money via ads (google facebook) and ai/ml helps with better targeting
everyone else is pissing away VC money.
FTFY.... I don't think AMD will be competitive in AI until at least 2025, though given their broken roadmap promises, not sure if anyone will be willing to invest in them
B) re: value adds, like what exactly?
C) this seems like such core functionality that a company wouldn’t outsource this to a 3rd party vendor. If that’s the case, there isn’t an opportunity to sell anything if you’re that AL/ML vendor then.
Like, it's plausible that many organizations would be willing to pay lots of money for a "ChatGPT which knows my internal documents" AI/ML feature for the Sharepoint/Confluence/etc they are currently using, but a would be very wary of migrating those internal documents to some upcoming startups' new document management system.
Just do a quick HN search on companies selling AI/ML, you will see what I mean.
The further you keep the user away from training and hosting, the less you’re in those businesses. But I would think it’s only economical to do that if you have some type of advantage in implementing the things you’re abstracting away.
Oh I assumed they were directly delivering them truckful of A100s? do they actually still bother with cash? ;-)
HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.
While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.
> Its revenue run rate has spiked this year and now sits at around $30 million to $50 million, three sources said — with one noting that it had more that tripled compared to the start of the year.
I can't for the life of me understand the strategy that Clem and team have, other than raise as much money as possible just because they can. My experience with their sales teams was just absolutely awful, and it gave me no hope that they can grow ARR as soon as they need to. We practically begged them to sell us something, but it wasn't until we went elsewhere definitively that they seemed interested.
Google has poured hundreds of million into Anthropic due to Eric Schmidt, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.
What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.
Network effect. It's more like a GitHub for ML.
Also trust. When your business is hosting binaries, that's no small feat.
Docker also had DockerHub, but it wasn’t as necessary as GitHub and didn’t catch on as well.
I think HF is more like docker than GitHub. GitHub had the wide scope to be huge. Docker was too niche (in comparison) and didn’t catch on so much to be necessary for every single project like Git did.
Similarly, HF is also niche in the sense that docker is. There’s no need to host your model on HF, it’s just a convenience for some projects. It’s effectively a package manager for ML models.
It seems that if there’s a way to make models more easily runnable, HF would not be necessary at all. They have a community there, but it’s not something that can be monetized well.
What was the moat when AWS EC2 launched in 2007? There were already thousands of little mom-and-pop VPS companies that would rent you a virtual Linux box with root permissions for $15/month.
What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.
If it wants everyone to fork its models, having the model on Huggingface and using its libraries will increase adoption, as people are used to that format, having the quantization built-in, etc. Having to perform model conversions slows things down, despite TheBloke’s constant efforts to convert every format to every other.
If the model will only be accessible through CLI, APIs, or a website UI, then custom can make sense.
I am curious however, why name drop Elon and X.ai when asking this question?
With all due respect, I'm not sure how that is going to advance the technical conversation, and in some regards may indeed de-rail it and hinder the mentoring you might receive?
I hope I do not sound combative!
I am generally curious, as I see this behavior at $JOB, but in reverse. "My customer is seeing this." "I have a customer that is asking Y."
I am generally curious on the different perspectives that teammates can come from, that can drive them to take wildly non-congruent approaches, even with similar career experiences.
You work at a business and you think it's name dropping for a colleague to bring up specific customers' needs?
I'm trying to see the steel man version of your argument, but I'm not getting it. GP is working for a well publicized AI startup and shared that they are evaluating HF versus alternatives. I thought it was useful information, and it's germane to this thread.
Y'all could host models on HF, and use the HF format/download code (which is quite good).
But make a pretty frontend for it.
Down the road you could just host your own backend implementing the HF API, if such a thing is necessary.
2) How in the world are they going to pay it back?
They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.
1) Grow 2) They don't. It's not a loan. VC world doesn't operate on loans. You go to the bank for that.
https://huggingface.co/pricing
I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.
• Repository storage is free, with a paid enterprise offering, à la GitHub.
• Serving a demo app has hourly costs (“Spaces Hardware”)
• Serving a production model for an app hosted elsewhere is also hourly (“Inference endpoints”)
• Training models is free for now (“AutoTrain”; honestly I haven’t tried this one.)
Citation needed.
Bonus points for certifying the models actually do what they say. That by itself will probably become a mini industry.
Hugging Face are the clear leaders in terms of having mindshare in the community to be able to build it.
We’re not in a world where non tech people are searching for models in the model store from their phone.
Edit: dang, guess HN strips out emojis from posts. The Punycode version of the Hugging Face emoji on a relevant TLD supporting emoji domains would be http://xn--zp9h.ml/
I hope the founders take their share home and have fun burning the rest. At least hopefully some open software/AI models will have come out of it when the company collapses under its own weight.
Added to the fact that of they get too dominant they'll get leveraged out of the supply chain and I'm not sure what the value proposition is here.
I mean obviously I'll be wrong but it's hard to not be skeptical
I wouldn't be surprised if there is little to near zero risk for Nvidia with this bet.
