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In the ML industry, there are two type of companies. 1/ Open source companies like huggingface (https://github.com/huggingface https://github.com/huggingface),
by ___luigi 5y ago
In the ML industry, there are two type of companies.
1/ Open source companies like huggingface (https://github.com/huggingface https://github.com/huggingface), explosion (https://github.com/explosion https://github.com/explosion), Fast.ai that democratized access to ML and provided a set of tools & language models for engineers. These companies didn't only manage to build a company and open source projects, they built a welcoming community and it's impressive to see all these students use these tools to tackle bigger problems. That's what"democratized" mean to an engineer[1].
2/ Media companies that built ML APIs to ease the use of such services like OpenAI. I think this company falls under this category.
[1]: https://marksaroufim.substack.com/p/machine-learning-the-great-stagnation https://marksaroufim.substack.com/p/machine-learning-the-gre...
- fxtentacle 5y agoDo you know how Huggingface can pay their bills? How do you monetize an AI that everyone can freely download?
- ___luigi 5y agoYes. HF is built on a tiered subscription (SaaS) model. https://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing You can refer to this discussion for more details: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1285204129225281536 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1285204129225281536
- Tenoke 5y agoI believe huggingface mostly subsist on investments and the amount they earn directly is still pretty small compared to expenses, is that no longer the case?
- h0mie 5y agoOne of the founders said on twitter (don't remember when exactly, but less than a year I think) thay they were cash flow positive.
- ___luigi 5y agoYes, this is the tweet: https://twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1354007933315645441 https://twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1354007933315645441
- fxtentacle 5y agoThank you :) I guess I'm now "old" in the sense that it never occurred to me to search for this kind of info on Twitter.
- streetcat1 5y agoUnfortunately the new models are very big, hence they cannot be released as smaller models (as open source). They must be served as an api.