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They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as fram

They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
htrp 3y ago
Do they really? As far as I can tell, diffusers/transformer are open sourced wrappers around torch implementations, there are a bunch of companies that are offering inference (just like they are), and there is some value in offering S3 storage to allow for model search. If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Their Git LFS based hosting is used by a lot of AI tools. Huggingface level data storage and transfer would also be VERY costly to accomplish for a small party. Some of these models are several gigabytes in size and downloaded hundreds or thousands of time per day. What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.
  - htrp 3y ago
    If Amazon/Google/Microsoft wanted to own that space, they could do it in a heartbeat. Rumor has it Github is actively working on something similar to HF Hub already
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      agile ; community-minded ; efficient pick one if you are lucky. Those Fortune-12 giants can't do anything "in a heartbeat" .. listen to what that means.. nonsense
    - forgingahead 3y ago
      I've seen some repos on Github host the models on "Releases". Not sure how viable that is long term, but definitely easier to download and access than some random Google Drive link which is typical for a lot of other repos.
  - lsmeducation 3y ago
    Lol, I’m sorry what? Has anyone heard of BitTorrent or piracy in general? You’re telling me AI models/data are too big? Someone utilize p2p for the love of god. Pretty sure there’s gigabytes of porn moving (freely) through the internet millions of times per day.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      Some models are distributed P2P. They download slower, in my experience, and require special software rather than the usual git commands. P2P model distribution isn't impossible, but it's a lot less interesting to many people, or they would've already spread their models through torrents in the first place.
      - lostmsu 3y ago
        There is just no convenient torrent-based model hub yet. But if HF's server code is open source it should be trivial to make one.
    - esafak 3y ago
      GitTorrent came and went.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    CivitAI has somehow managed this over in Stable Diffusion land. In fact, I think the whole community is HF averse. The two most popular frameworks are based around the Stability implemenetaion and file format, not HF diffusers.
    - version_five 3y ago
      Any sense of why they are HF averse?
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        I'm not even sure its deliberate. Automatic1111 and ComfyUI implemented the SAI backend/format in the early days because thats all there was, and now they are stuck with it. The intertia is tremendous.
        Auracle 3y ago
        The popular fork of Automatic1111 SD.Next recently implemented diffusers for its SDXL support. It seems like an odd move to me as what makes Auto1111 so appealing are the extensions and I’m assuming that breaks an awful lot of them, but what do I know?
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Any sense of why they are HF averse? Technology-wise, path dependency from stuff that was built out before HF diffusers were available, and on which more continues to be built in the ecosystem. If you are doing a greenfield project that is mostly standalone, its not an issue, but for existing popular projects and the communities of satellite projects around them, the switching cost is high. In terms of content hosting, well, a fair amount is hosted on HF, but there is a difference of content focus between CivitAI and HF, and a lot of what CivitAI hosts HF probably wouldn’t want to. Also, CivitAI has a UI focused on the narrow space of imagegen, whereas HF is more general.
      - IKantRead 3y ago
        I think they're HF averse because HF is fairly anti-NSFW content and it's pretty clear that civit.ai has a fairly large NFSW focused audience. On top of that HF is just hard to use for your average user. Civit.ai is just "click to download" while HF is "look here's a broken model card... you can figure it out from here". Despite the cute logo, I think most people find that HF comes across as fairly anti-user. Despite having years doing ML related work, I still find HF a bit byzantine to navigate.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    Is that so different than some free to play video games? Those are sometimes hundreds of GB and downloaded by millions.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      They come with a finely tuned monetization system built in and are very profitable
- version_five 3y ago
  They have this "accelerate" framework they push too: https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index I don't know much about it, and I think (but couldn't quickly confirm) it's open source, so your point about a fork still stands, although I don't think that solves everything. If it did, people wouldn't care that e.g. Hashicorp changed their license away from open source.
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
Diversify to what, though? The economics of hosting models and datasets seem to just not be great in general. For the same reasons that we can expect HF to eventually crack down on the "freeloaders", I think pretty much any other entity also will unless it's explicitly set up as a public benefit. I could see this sort of thing maybe being funded by universities or their affiliated foundations, but most companies with the resources to provide this kind of hosting also have a pretty strong incentive to extract revenue from it.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Pip, maven, npm, docker hub, apt-get, github and suchlike seem to manage to provide hefty binary downloads with no need to monetise anonymous downloads. I don't quite understand how they do so, but it seems to be possible. Everyone who downloads a 5GB stable diffusion model probably downloaded 5GB of pytorch+cuda+cudnn first.
  - Lord_Zero 3y ago
    Back in the day, universities would host all that shit via their mirrors for free for everyone. Not sure where it all is today with the cloud being so prevalent.
    - zo1 3y ago
      You don't even hear the term mirror anymore.
      - basilgohar 3y ago
        Linux distros still have large networks of mirrors for downloading their releases and also packaged binary updates. Maybe we don't "hear" the term but they are still there.
      - outside1234 3y ago
        We call them CDNs now :)
bakuninsbart 3y ago
You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.
- pradn 3y ago
  Late in the "enshittification cycle", competitors do rise, but they're usually under-resourced. So you get a overly-monetized primary product and a bunch of "never quite there" competitors. That's overall worse than at the primary product's "free beer" phase.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    The most likely successful entrants I can imagine are big tech. They’ll either build or buy the best competitor. And they all already have data centers ready to go
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  >there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering There are network effects in play here. They have a big moat purely because of their large user base.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Similar to GitHub which I imagine they want to emulate. Sure there are other public code repositories but most people find GitHub good enough to not bother looking at options
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Basically all the HF code is Apache and open source. 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.
amelius 3y ago
When it comes to that we'll use AI to migrate everything over :)
amelius 3y ago
It's always the same with these f'ing marketplaces/platforms. There should be new laws for crowdsourced value.
vl 3y ago
When I use HF to get some base model I always make sure I have local copy and then load from the local copy. I push said copy into (remote, obviously) git for the eventuality of HF going down/model being removed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

htrp 3y ago

Do they really? As far as I can tell, diffusers/transformer are open sourced wrappers around torch implementations, there are a bunch of companies that are offering inference (just like they are), and there is some value in offering S3 storage to allow for model search. If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"

jeroenhd 3y ago
Their Git LFS based hosting is used by a lot of AI tools. Huggingface level data storage and transfer would also be VERY costly to accomplish for a small party. Some of these models are several gigabytes in size and downloaded hundreds or thousands of time per day. What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.
- htrp 3y ago
  If Amazon/Google/Microsoft wanted to own that space, they could do it in a heartbeat. Rumor has it Github is actively working on something similar to HF Hub already
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    agile ; community-minded ; efficient pick one if you are lucky. Those Fortune-12 giants can't do anything "in a heartbeat" .. listen to what that means.. nonsense
  - forgingahead 3y ago
    I've seen some repos on Github host the models on "Releases". Not sure how viable that is long term, but definitely easier to download and access than some random Google Drive link which is typical for a lot of other repos.
- lsmeducation 3y ago
  Lol, I’m sorry what? Has anyone heard of BitTorrent or piracy in general? You’re telling me AI models/data are too big? Someone utilize p2p for the love of god. Pretty sure there’s gigabytes of porn moving (freely) through the internet millions of times per day.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Some models are distributed P2P. They download slower, in my experience, and require special software rather than the usual git commands. P2P model distribution isn't impossible, but it's a lot less interesting to many people, or they would've already spread their models through torrents in the first place.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      There is just no convenient torrent-based model hub yet. But if HF's server code is open source it should be trivial to make one.
  - esafak 3y ago
    GitTorrent came and went.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  CivitAI has somehow managed this over in Stable Diffusion land. In fact, I think the whole community is HF averse. The two most popular frameworks are based around the Stability implemenetaion and file format, not HF diffusers.
  - version_five 3y ago
    Any sense of why they are HF averse?
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      I'm not even sure its deliberate. Automatic1111 and ComfyUI implemented the SAI backend/format in the early days because thats all there was, and now they are stuck with it. The intertia is tremendous.
      - Auracle 3y ago
        The popular fork of Automatic1111 SD.Next recently implemented diffusers for its SDXL support. It seems like an odd move to me as what makes Auto1111 so appealing are the extensions and I’m assuming that breaks an awful lot of them, but what do I know?
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Any sense of why they are HF averse? Technology-wise, path dependency from stuff that was built out before HF diffusers were available, and on which more continues to be built in the ecosystem. If you are doing a greenfield project that is mostly standalone, its not an issue, but for existing popular projects and the communities of satellite projects around them, the switching cost is high. In terms of content hosting, well, a fair amount is hosted on HF, but there is a difference of content focus between CivitAI and HF, and a lot of what CivitAI hosts HF probably wouldn’t want to. Also, CivitAI has a UI focused on the narrow space of imagegen, whereas HF is more general.
    - IKantRead 3y ago
      I think they're HF averse because HF is fairly anti-NSFW content and it's pretty clear that civit.ai has a fairly large NFSW focused audience. On top of that HF is just hard to use for your average user. Civit.ai is just "click to download" while HF is "look here's a broken model card... you can figure it out from here". Despite the cute logo, I think most people find that HF comes across as fairly anti-user. Despite having years doing ML related work, I still find HF a bit byzantine to navigate.
- dharmab 3y ago
  Is that so different than some free to play video games? Those are sometimes hundreds of GB and downloaded by millions.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    They come with a finely tuned monetization system built in and are very profitable
version_five 3y ago
They have this "accelerate" framework they push too: https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/index I don't know much about it, and I think (but couldn't quickly confirm) it's open source, so your point about a fork still stands, although I don't think that solves everything. If it did, people wouldn't care that e.g. Hashicorp changed their license away from open source.

0xcde4c3db 3y ago

Diversify to what, though? The economics of hosting models and datasets seem to just not be great in general. For the same reasons that we can expect HF to eventually crack down on the "freeloaders", I think pretty much any other entity also will unless it's explicitly set up as a public benefit. I could see this sort of thing maybe being funded by universities or their affiliated foundations, but most companies with the resources to provide this kind of hosting also have a pretty strong incentive to extract revenue from it.

michaelt 3y ago
Pip, maven, npm, docker hub, apt-get, github and suchlike seem to manage to provide hefty binary downloads with no need to monetise anonymous downloads. I don't quite understand how they do so, but it seems to be possible. Everyone who downloads a 5GB stable diffusion model probably downloaded 5GB of pytorch+cuda+cudnn first.
- Lord_Zero 3y ago
  Back in the day, universities would host all that shit via their mirrors for free for everyone. Not sure where it all is today with the cloud being so prevalent.
  - zo1 3y ago
    You don't even hear the term mirror anymore.
    - basilgohar 3y ago
      Linux distros still have large networks of mirrors for downloading their releases and also packaged binary updates. Maybe we don't "hear" the term but they are still there.
    - outside1234 3y ago
      We call them CDNs now :)

bakuninsbart 3y ago

You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.

pradn 3y ago
Late in the "enshittification cycle", competitors do rise, but they're usually under-resourced. So you get a overly-monetized primary product and a bunch of "never quite there" competitors. That's overall worse than at the primary product's "free beer" phase.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  The most likely successful entrants I can imagine are big tech. They’ll either build or buy the best competitor. And they all already have data centers ready to go
foooorsyth 3y ago
>there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering There are network effects in play here. They have a big moat purely because of their large user base.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Similar to GitHub which I imagine they want to emulate. Sure there are other public code repositories but most people find GitHub good enough to not bother looking at options

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Basically all the HF code is Apache and open source. 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.

amelius 3y ago

When it comes to that we'll use AI to migrate everything over :)

amelius 3y ago

It's always the same with these f'ing marketplaces/platforms. There should be new laws for crowdsourced value.

vl 3y ago

When I use HF to get some base model I always make sure I have local copy and then load from the local copy. I push said copy into (remote, obviously) git for the eventuality of HF going down/model being removed.