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Hugging Face and AWS partner to make AI more accessible
- WhatsName 4y agoThat's unfortunate. I liked hugging face. Could have been the next github for ML. Hope the push to the AWS walled garden doesn't eat them alive.
- chipgap98 4y agoI don't really understand how this announcement will prevent them from becoming the next github for ML. This is about making it easier to run huggingface models in AWS.
- nkozyra 4y agoThat's how it starts, isn't it?
- RobotToaster 4y ago>becoming the next github for ML. Considering github digested all the open source code into a proprietary AI...
- Casteil 4y agoOne AI to rule them all (sorry)
- babelfish 4y agoNot an acquisition, just a product
- burna_aws_acct 4y ago... all the way to slaughter.
- burna_aws_acct 4y agoSame. Pretty bummed. I like HuggingFace, but there's no such thing as "partnership" when Amazon's involved. Amazon has a clear reputation of "brand killer" (e.g., Zappos, IMDb, 6pm, WholeFoods, ComiXology, GoodReads, Roomba, Ring, Eufy, Woot, Sleep Jar, Fabric.com, Shopbop, Graphiq). Very much "if you can't beat'em, eat'em," although I sometimes wonder if it's negligence more than strategy. After all, their own services don't even work half the time (e.g., Prime Video and Music, Alexa), and its retail site is overrun with fake goods with fake reviews. Good luck, HuggingFace. You'll need it, along with an active team of lawyers and a backup repo in Azure. Edit: Adding additional sentiment below. I desperately wish what I said above wasn't true. I am in no way faulting employees who work(-ed) on these projects with best of intentions. Persons who have endured understand, the problem is above, not necessarily below. Again I will strongly encourage HuggingFace to have backups and lawyers. Please don't give everything away; there is no good faith at present.
- zachlatta 4y agoI believe the examples you’re highlighting were acquisitions, not partnerships. This seems more along the lines of https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/amazon-and-stripe https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/amazon-and-stripe
- burna_aws_acct 4y agoI will say this. Many acquisitions begin as partnerships. Shall we begin to unearth the "partnership" with Stripe, and its impact to customers? Perhaps a necessary discussion worth continuing elsewhere, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34863530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34863530...
- bradknowles 4y agoI worked at Whole Foods (before and after the acquisition), and I have been a Prime Video customer for as long as I can remember. I remain a happy customer of both. Whole Foods is still expensive, and there are some things I want to buy that they still don't sell. And so I tend to do the majority of my shopping at HEB instead. But I acknowledge that Whole Foods is still objectively better in this space -- in virtually all regards other than price. Prime Video works well for me, and always has. Almost as good as AppleTV. My wife and I probably watch more stuff on Prime Video than all the other services combined. I haven't used any of the other services you mentioned, so I can't speak for them. But these two have always worked very well for me, and so far as I can tell, will continue to do so for a long time. What will happen with the HuggingFace partnership, I have no idea. But I do look forward to watching this partnership play out and what each can do for the other.
- tootie 4y agoThere's nothing to indicate this means they will be exclusive to Amazon. Only that they'll add some integrations or even just pricing consideration for AWS customers.
- synergy20 4y agodoes AWS provide a google colab alike environment, colab is now sign-in then using it, AWS you have to jump so many hoops to start using it, could be easier to access.
- amrrs 4y agoCheck out AWS Sage maker studio Lab
- SamSkjord 4y agoAnd when you delete the Sagemaker domain, remember to also delete everything associated with it under the Lifecycle configuration... that was an expensive weekend
- synergy20 4y agoisn't sagemaker studio lab fully free? it's said colab is easier to use, but sagemaker studio lab provides better hardware underneath.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI agree that Google Colab is so much nicer to use, but if you already use AWS, have accounts and access control already setup, the SageMaker Studio is OK to use also. It is usually easy to take existing Jupiter notebooks and run them on either platform, assuming data is easily accessible.
- synergy20 4y agoThanks. Not aware of this until now. Just registered, seems cool. Trying to compare it with colab on the freemium plan, I guess they must be close to each other(how long you can run a sesssion,how much cpu/gpu resource you can use for free,etc)
- arcatech 4y agoFunny how both OpenAI and now Hugging Face promise “openness” for their AI tools so that they’re “accessible to everyone” and then both partner with big tech companies who are trying to control and monetize as much as they can.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoHuggingface started off as GitHub for machine learning and anyone can download the models there. OpenAI has everything behind a black box where you don’t exactly know what actually happening. Then to monetize they host the models you want to use at a cost which would be a good investment for Amazon but you can still self host using their libraries.
- enoreyes 4y agoHugging Face internally has a lot of very strong believers (including the exec team) in open source + decentralized approach towards AI as the only safe and productive way forward. HF is ostensibly the only place to find deep+broad resources for open source DL and transformers/diffusers are the libraries du jour of open DL. Compute is really important for AI, and having a cloud provider align themselves with an organization which is genuinely trying to be "Open" AI is I think a positive step forward.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoLeadership is fungible,everyone has a price, and words are innevitably wind. I would consider this a solid step in the direction agaisnt why huggingface is actually useful.
- enoreyes 4y agoNot disagreeing with your first point, but as I see it - this only enables HF to continue to spend money on making good open source tooling + doing research on open alternatives to closed source LLMs (something sorely needed), while opening them up to more enterprise customers who primarily use AWS. FWIW I am an ML engineer there (maybe should have disclosed earlier) and I feel pretty optimistic about the opportunities this will enable for the open source community. Maybe with the visibility into the closed door discussions I have a more positive attitude, or maybe I'm being naive. Time will tell!
- alexb_ 4y agoDid I miss a memo somewhere that said "every single AI related announcement must pretend as if you are bringing peace to the world and solving all forms of inequality forever"? I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"? Even the langauge of "accessible" which is constantly used by AI people over and over is just absurd. It feels like whoever wrote this mashed together Social Justice Words until they got something intelligable. Example: >“The future of AI is here, but it’s not evenly distributed,” said Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. “Accessibility and transparency are the keys to sharing progress and creating tools to use these new capabilities wisely and responsibly. Amazon SageMaker and AWS-designed chips will enable our team and the larger machine learning community to convert the latest research into openly reproducible models that anyone can build on.”
- Zetice 4y agoI agree completely with this sentiment. I don’t want to create great new works of literature, I just wanna label some text with metadata and learn the bare minimum about some random tech I’m supposed to use next quarter. I predict the next year will be companies promising AI will fix everything wrong about my life, and approximately zero will deliver. The companies who will do well will be the companies who don’t even advertise their AI use, but incorporate it into their existing value prop.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI get what you're saying but I'd put hugging face as an exception. When I read democratizing access, I see a company making models freely available to the masses who do not necessarily have the resources to train them themselves. Is it solving global poverty or hunger? No of course not. Is it helping to tear down the ivory tower of academia or fill in the moats surrounding megacorps? Yes. But now they're just another cog in a megacorp..
- minimaxir 4y ago> I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"? That slogan made more sense back when Hugging Face first launched in 2019 and training models was prohibitively expensive and required sorting through poor model training codebases, but nowadays it's less applicable. (cost/efficiency of GPUs is much better and lots of higher level libraries, including Hugging Face's transformers, reduces a lot of the pain)
- Sophira 4y agoI don't see any mention of what Amazon are actually doing for this partnership. other than providing the same services they provide for everyone. This reads like "Amazon gave us a bunch of money for us to use and promote AWS."
- karmasimida 4y agoUnless Google or MSFR buying huggingface upfront, this is going to eventually make sure AWS be the fist class citizen for future huggingface initiatives Including all open source models
- brianjking 4y agoand that's almost certainly what's happened, lol.
- burna_aws_acct 4y agoThis is correct. All of a sudden, we'll see "Amazon state-of-the-art Natural Understanding systems paving the way [blah blah blah]"... Umm... No. It's HuggingFace. And just like that, HuggingFace fades away; its well-earned recognition reassigned to Amazon, by Amazon. It's not a possibility; it's a certainty. Shout out to Amazon though. People keep falling for the "partnership promise." The wax must be hella poetic.
- inductive_magic 4y agoMy startup computes everything locally. We use our own hardware. If we'll ever get to the point where we need serious dynamic scaling, sure, we'll use cloud-tooling. But for now, cloud-compute has zero alignment with our vision and strategy. AWS is powerful and surely has its place, but "run it on Bezos' hardware" doesn't exactly spark confidence in "open" or "democratized" AI progress. One thing I love about Huggingface is that I can simply download a model and do stuff with it. Iirc, I couldn't download some models and was instead incentivized to use Sage Maker (maybe only for finetuning? I don't recall exactly) recently. I deeply hope that this partnership doesn't become a "to use models hosted by huggingface, you must use AWS". The fact that this announcement reeks of business speak ("Together, the two leaders aim to accelerate [...]") leaves a bad feeling in my mouth.
- shashanoid 4y agoLame. Everyone keep getting sold to the same shitpile at the end of the day.
- elforce002 4y agoWell, with the current climate it's not far fetched to try to milk something out of it and cash out before the ship starts sinking.
- 1024core 4y agoNext headline: HugingFace agrees to be acquired by Amazon.
- derbOac 4y agoIdeally I'd like to see more work on decentralized AI/DL methods. Maybe that's out there (I should dig into it more than I have) but either way I think it needs more attention.
- nothrowaways 4y agoThe world is at war- Amazon burning compute resources on hugging face to fight MSFT. Same way as US doing with missiles, if you know what I mean. Jokes aside, hugging face is the real open AI in the space and desperately needs this.
- locknessness 4y agoDisclaimer: I used to work for AWS ML Buried in the press release is the announcement that there will be a push to bring up models on the AWS Trainium accelerator. In the name of "ML democratization" this agreement could help shift tides away from the Nvidia HW + SW monopoly. Amazon (trn1) and Google (TPU) are little guys compared to Nvidia. The book may already be written. Pytorch is heavily biased towards libraries that are customized for cuda/Nvidia (see FSDP). This leaves the other HW folks playing SW catch-up, with everyone rallying behind the open source XLA compiler. It's too bad the press release didn't touch on these points and used cliche rhetoric instead.
- lockfreeness 4y ago[dead]