6 ms·

Hugging Face Acquires Gradio

77 points by aliabd 5y ago

aliabd 5y ago
We posted gradio as a Show HN mid 2020 [1] :) Got a lot of good feedback and have been slowly growing ever since! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- abidlabs 5y ago
  Particularly, one of the most useful feedback we heard early on was adding support for rendering the GUI in jupyter/colab notebooks. Extremely common use case (that also allowed us to distinguish ourselves from some competitors)
minimaxir 5y ago
It's interesting that for Hugging Face Spaces that Gradio beat out the more-established/more VC-backed Streamlit, despite many functional and API similarities (I haven't used both enough to explicitly compare/contrast).
- andreyk 5y ago
  HF has integrations for both though right?
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Yes.
Reubend 5y ago
Forgive me for the somewhat disparaging comment, but Gradio's product seems very basic to be. Can anyone shed some light on why HF felt the need to acquire them, rather than to just build their own version? Is there really so much complexity there that it was quicker to just acquire?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Maybe it's an "acqui-hire".
- laGrenouille 5y ago
  I agree about the product; perhaps they were acquired for the people rather than the actual IP. Would make sense from that perspective for HF, which has leaned strongly in the text direction, if they want to expand in the AI space.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    HF has expanded beyond text into image/video; gradio can do multimedia I/O.
- roseway4 5y ago
  Possibly an acquihire? Pure conjecture: They may have had difficulty competing with Streamlit[0] and decided to throw in the towel. [0] https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Consider that they could have been bought for $1.
- andreyk 5y ago
  Gradio is already integrated to some extent to HF's platform, and nothing is as trivial to build as it seems. So it just made sense to buy an existing refined solution and to hit the ground running rather than build from scratch.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Is it only me that transposes Hugging Face to Face Hugger? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franchise)#Facehugger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc...
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  This is 100% what I think of. I have no idea what this company does but the name is terrible and terrible names kill good companies.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    As I understand, it's a reference to the Hugging Face emoji, which is supposed to be a kind of emblem for the complexity and promise of natural language processing. Or something like that, anyway.
- dvirsky 5y ago
  Me too, I had to see the emoji for it to click that it's not an Alien reference.
  - d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
    Speaking of logos, the Gradio logo looks very much like that of DataBricks
- bigbluedots 5y ago
  Definitely not just you, when I first saw a link I was looking for the Aliens reference and was slightly confused
GrayShade 5y ago
Mostly unrelated, but that sketch recognition demo on the landing page is worse [1] than the Xerox photocopier firmware from a while back [2]. EDIT: to be fair, it does work slightly better on mobile. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU. [2]: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
- abidlabs 5y ago
  Asking for clarification so that we can improve it -- is it that the UI is not usable, or is that the model predicts things inaccurately? If it's the latter, it might say more about the model (a convolutional network with high accuracy on the MNIST dataset) than Gradio
  - BasilPH 5y ago
    The UI is fine. The model seems to struggle with me drawing 6 on desktop. Reading "Sketch Recognition" I was expecting something akin to Google draw which recognises objects like cars and trees. The digit classifier is of course fine, but I felt a bit disappointed when I realised it "only" does numbers. I also think it's the least impressive of the demos you have.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Probably not even the model, but the preprocessing - MNIST-trained models expect all the digits to have the same preprocessing that MNIST had (because that's all they saw), so if you apply a MNIST-optimized model directly to user-generated input without e.g. resizing and re-centering the images (or, alternatively, a "robustized" model trained with various data augmentations), then you're going to have horrible results.
  - AstroDogCatcher 5y ago
    The latter - the results are astoundingly bad. You should remove that demo ASAP.
    - 5y ago
nilsbunger 5y ago
I got to work with the Gradio founders as an early investor. They are a fantastic ML team, and they really leaned into doing lots of customer outreach to find their market. Congrats to Abu, Ali^2, Dawood, and the team; well-deserved and excited for the next phase of your journey.
- aliabd 5y ago
  Thank you Nils! We were very fortunate to work with you and all of the awesome people at Pear!
- abidlabs 5y ago
  Very grateful to you and Pear for the all the lessons on talking to customers. Will remember for a long time!
FL33TW00D 5y ago
This was a given if you follow this space closely - surprised it took this long.
hwers 5y ago
Both seem like such weird products to me. As soon as you build something that people would find useful the thing becomes unusable with a 10 day queue since apps are only granted CPU resources. The only reason I see for the flood of people making thing on there is the heavy amount somewhat annoying amount of attention they grab for on twitter etc. Just a weird thing in my eyes.
- abidlabs 5y ago
  If I (as a Gradio founder) can offer a different perspective: most apps on Hugging Face Spaces are not designed for production-level traffic. Instead, it might be a researcher who wants to share a demo of their model for reproducibility purposes, a student who's built a class project, or a hobbyist interested in building out a portfolio. For most of these projects, writing a simple gradio application and hosting on Spaces is the easiest way to share their machine learning model.
AstroDogCatcher 5y ago
I just tried the demo sketch thing on the Gradio site and it wasn't able to correctly interpret a single digit I tried, even after 6 or 7 attempts with different values. Serious question - is this a spoof site? I find it hard to believe character recognition can be that bad, in a marketing demo no less.
rg111 5y ago
I have used Gradio and Streamlit extensively, and I am very disappointed with Gradio. The options are limited, the UI is ugly, customisability is near non-existent. I dumped using it, and focused entirely on Streamlit. I am satisfied. At a previous company, we used Gradio + Strelit to demo apps to clients. We ditched Gradio and switched fully to Streamlit. I recommend Streamlit over Gradio any day. What Gradio has better than Streamlit is just better marketing. The CEO twitted tirelessly about Gradio demos that others built, and these are the most eye-catching parts of AI "research". So those tweets would catch attention and RTs. Then they hired one of the most followed person in the AI space- Abdul Khalique. He is @ak<some_number> on Twitter. He, for a long time, tweets new and noticeable arXiv papers, and hence has a considerable following. Gradio hired him, and he now posted arXiv papers and their Gradio demos, and tagged Gradio at each tweet. That's how the word got around and with their marketing game, they increased market share. Now I see the acquisition. I would say that the CEO had this acquisition as his goal for a long time. He would post Gradio demos, tag Hugging Face at each possible tweets. Gradio is sub-quality product at best, and useless at worst.
- randyzwitch 5y ago
  (Note: I'm Head of Developer Relations at Streamlit) While I cannot speak to your experience with either project, I do want to point out that open-source doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. Gradio has different goals than Streamlit, which has different goals than Flask and Django. In the end, congratulations to both HuggingFace and Gradio, Streamlit looks forward to seeing what they end up building!
- d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
  Can someone comment on the use case for StreamLit ? It initially seemed exciting in that “I don’t need designers and front end coders, and I can build a cool looking web app in a few hours all in Python”, my conclusion is that you can do a few simple things super easily, but you hit a wall when you want to have anything beyond basic navigation and layouts. In other words, great for INTERNAL apps or DEMOS but not for a SaaS product?
  - rg111 5y ago

77 points by aliabd 5y ago

We posted gradio as a Show HN mid 2020 [1] :) Got a lot of good feedback and have been slowly growing ever since! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
abidlabs 5y ago
Particularly, one of the most useful feedback we heard early on was adding support for rendering the GUI in jupyter/colab notebooks. Extremely common use case (that also allowed us to distinguish ourselves from some competitors)

minimaxir 5y ago

It's interesting that for Hugging Face Spaces that Gradio beat out the more-established/more VC-backed Streamlit, despite many functional and API similarities (I haven't used both enough to explicitly compare/contrast).

andreyk 5y ago
HF has integrations for both though right?
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Yes.

Reubend 5y ago

Forgive me for the somewhat disparaging comment, but Gradio's product seems very basic to be. Can anyone shed some light on why HF felt the need to acquire them, rather than to just build their own version? Is there really so much complexity there that it was quicker to just acquire?

nerdponx 5y ago
Maybe it's an "acqui-hire".
laGrenouille 5y ago
I agree about the product; perhaps they were acquired for the people rather than the actual IP. Would make sense from that perspective for HF, which has leaned strongly in the text direction, if they want to expand in the AI space.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  HF has expanded beyond text into image/video; gradio can do multimedia I/O.
roseway4 5y ago
Possibly an acquihire? Pure conjecture: They may have had difficulty competing with Streamlit[0] and decided to throw in the towel. [0] https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/
oh_sigh 5y ago
Consider that they could have been bought for $1.
andreyk 5y ago
Gradio is already integrated to some extent to HF's platform, and nothing is as trivial to build as it seems. So it just made sense to buy an existing refined solution and to hit the ground running rather than build from scratch.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

Is it only me that transposes Hugging Face to Face Hugger? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franchise)#Facehugger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc...

hallway_monitor 5y ago
This is 100% what I think of. I have no idea what this company does but the name is terrible and terrible names kill good companies.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  As I understand, it's a reference to the Hugging Face emoji, which is supposed to be a kind of emblem for the complexity and promise of natural language processing. Or something like that, anyway.
dvirsky 5y ago
Me too, I had to see the emoji for it to click that it's not an Alien reference.
- d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
  Speaking of logos, the Gradio logo looks very much like that of DataBricks
bigbluedots 5y ago
Definitely not just you, when I first saw a link I was looking for the Aliens reference and was slightly confused

GrayShade 5y ago

Mostly unrelated, but that sketch recognition demo on the landing page is worse [1] than the Xerox photocopier firmware from a while back [2]. EDIT: to be fair, it does work slightly better on mobile. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU. [2]: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

abidlabs 5y ago
Asking for clarification so that we can improve it -- is it that the UI is not usable, or is that the model predicts things inaccurately? If it's the latter, it might say more about the model (a convolutional network with high accuracy on the MNIST dataset) than Gradio
- BasilPH 5y ago
  The UI is fine. The model seems to struggle with me drawing 6 on desktop. Reading "Sketch Recognition" I was expecting something akin to Google draw which recognises objects like cars and trees. The digit classifier is of course fine, but I felt a bit disappointed when I realised it "only" does numbers. I also think it's the least impressive of the demos you have.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Probably not even the model, but the preprocessing - MNIST-trained models expect all the digits to have the same preprocessing that MNIST had (because that's all they saw), so if you apply a MNIST-optimized model directly to user-generated input without e.g. resizing and re-centering the images (or, alternatively, a "robustized" model trained with various data augmentations), then you're going to have horrible results.
- AstroDogCatcher 5y ago
  The latter - the results are astoundingly bad. You should remove that demo ASAP.
  - 5y ago

nilsbunger 5y ago

I got to work with the Gradio founders as an early investor. They are a fantastic ML team, and they really leaned into doing lots of customer outreach to find their market. Congrats to Abu, Ali^2, Dawood, and the team; well-deserved and excited for the next phase of your journey.

aliabd 5y ago
Thank you Nils! We were very fortunate to work with you and all of the awesome people at Pear!
abidlabs 5y ago
Very grateful to you and Pear for the all the lessons on talking to customers. Will remember for a long time!

FL33TW00D 5y ago

This was a given if you follow this space closely - surprised it took this long.

hwers 5y ago

Both seem like such weird products to me. As soon as you build something that people would find useful the thing becomes unusable with a 10 day queue since apps are only granted CPU resources. The only reason I see for the flood of people making thing on there is the heavy amount somewhat annoying amount of attention they grab for on twitter etc. Just a weird thing in my eyes.

abidlabs 5y ago
If I (as a Gradio founder) can offer a different perspective: most apps on Hugging Face Spaces are not designed for production-level traffic. Instead, it might be a researcher who wants to share a demo of their model for reproducibility purposes, a student who's built a class project, or a hobbyist interested in building out a portfolio. For most of these projects, writing a simple gradio application and hosting on Spaces is the easiest way to share their machine learning model.

AstroDogCatcher 5y ago

I just tried the demo sketch thing on the Gradio site and it wasn't able to correctly interpret a single digit I tried, even after 6 or 7 attempts with different values. Serious question - is this a spoof site? I find it hard to believe character recognition can be that bad, in a marketing demo no less.

rg111 5y ago

I have used Gradio and Streamlit extensively, and I am very disappointed with Gradio. The options are limited, the UI is ugly, customisability is near non-existent. I dumped using it, and focused entirely on Streamlit. I am satisfied. At a previous company, we used Gradio + Strelit to demo apps to clients. We ditched Gradio and switched fully to Streamlit. I recommend Streamlit over Gradio any day. What Gradio has better than Streamlit is just better marketing. The CEO twitted tirelessly about Gradio demos that others built, and these are the most eye-catching parts of AI "research". So those tweets would catch attention and RTs. Then they hired one of the most followed person in the AI space- Abdul Khalique. He is @ak<some_number> on Twitter. He, for a long time, tweets new and noticeable arXiv papers, and hence has a considerable following. Gradio hired him, and he now posted arXiv papers and their Gradio demos, and tagged Gradio at each tweet. That's how the word got around and with their marketing game, they increased market share. Now I see the acquisition. I would say that the CEO had this acquisition as his goal for a long time. He would post Gradio demos, tag Hugging Face at each possible tweets. Gradio is sub-quality product at best, and useless at worst.

randyzwitch 5y ago
(Note: I'm Head of Developer Relations at Streamlit) While I cannot speak to your experience with either project, I do want to point out that open-source doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. Gradio has different goals than Streamlit, which has different goals than Flask and Django. In the end, congratulations to both HuggingFace and Gradio, Streamlit looks forward to seeing what they end up building!
d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
Can someone comment on the use case for StreamLit ? It initially seemed exciting in that “I don’t need designers and front end coders, and I can build a cool looking web app in a few hours all in Python”, my conclusion is that you can do a few simple things super easily, but you hit a wall when you want to have anything beyond basic navigation and layouts. In other words, great for INTERNAL apps or DEMOS but not for a SaaS product?
- rg111 5y ago