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I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI - one of the few quiet heroes (along with Chinese OSS) helping bring on-premise AI to the masses. I'm old eno
by mythz 8mo ago
I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI - one of the few quiet heroes (along with Chinese OSS) helping bring on-premise AI to the masses.
I'm old enough to remember when traffic was expensive, so I've no idea how they've managed to offer free hosting for so many models. Hopefully it's backed by a sustainable business model, as the ecosystem would be meaningfully worse without them.
We still need good value hardware to run Kimi/GLM in-house, but at least we've got the weights and distribution sorted.
- zozbot234 8mo ago> We still need good value hardware to run Kimi/GLM in-house If you stream weights in from SSD storage and freely use swap to extend your KV cache it will be really slow (multiple seconds per token!) but run on basically anything. And that's still really good for stuff that can be computed overnight, perhaps even by batching many requests simultaneously. It gets progressively better as you add more compute, of course.
- HPsquared 8mo agoAt a certain point the energy starts to cost more than renting some GPUs.
- vardalab 8mo agoYeah, that is hard to argue with because I just go to OpenRouter and play around with a lot of models before I decide which ones I like. But there's something special about running it locally in your basement
- dotancohen 8mo agoI'd love to hear more about this. How do you decide that you like a model? For which use cases?
- fc417fc802 8mo agoAren't decent GPU boxes in excess of $5 per hour? At $0.20 per kWhr (which is on the high side in the US) running a 1 kW workstation 24/7 would work out to the same price as 1 hour of GPU time. The issue you'll actually run into is that most residential housing isn't wired for more than ~2kW per room.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> it will be really slow (multiple seconds per token!) This is fun for proving that it can be done, but that's 100X slower than hosted models and 1000X slower than GPT-Codex-Spark. That's like going from real time conversation to e-mailing someone who only checks their inbox twice a day if you're lucky.
- zozbot234 8mo agoYou'd need real rack-scale/datacenter infrastructure to properly match the hosted models that are keeping everything in fast VRAM at all times, and then you only get reasonable utilization on that by serving requests from many users. The ~100X slower tier is totally okay for experimentation and non-conversational use cases (including some that are more agentic-like!), and you'd reach ~10X (quite usable for conversation) by running something like a good homelab.
- data-ottawa 8mo agoCan we toss in the work unsloth does too as an unsung hero? They provide excellent documentation and they’re often very quick to get high quality quants up in major formats. They’re a very trustworthy brand.
- cubie 8mo agoI'm a big fan of their work as well, good shout.
- danielhanchen 8mo agoThank you!
- disiplus 8mo agoYeah, they're the good guys. I suspect the open source work is mostly advertisements for them to sell consulting and services to enterprises. Otherwise, the work they do doesn't make sense to offer for free.
- arcanemachiner 8mo agoI hope that is exactly what is happening. It benefits them, and it benefits us.
- danielhanchen 8mo agoHaha for now our primary goal is to expand the market for local AI and educate people on how to do RL, fine-tuning and running quants :)
- WanderPanda 8mo agoAmazing work and people should really appreciate that the opportunity costs of your work are immense (given the hype). On another note: I'm a bit paranoid about quantization. I know people are not good at discerning model quality at these levels of "intelligence" anymore, I don't think a vibe check really catches the nuances. How hard would it be to systematically evaluate the different quantizations? E.g. on the Aider benchmark that you used in the past? I was recently trying Qwen 3 Coder Next and there are benchmark numbers in your article but they seem to be for the official checkpoint, not the quantized ones. But it is not even really clear (and chatbots confuse them for benchmarks of the quantized versions btw.) I think systematic/automated benchmarks would really bring the whole effort to the next level. Basically something like the bar chart from the Dynamic Quantization 2.0 article but always updated with all kinds of recent models.
- sowbug 8mo agoWhy doesn't HF support BitTorrent? I know about hf-torrent and hf_transfer, but those aren't nearly as accessible as a link in the web UI.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Why doesn't HF support BitTorrent? Harder to track downloads then. Only when clients hit the tracker would they be able to get download states, and forget about private repositories or the "gated" ones that Meta/Facebook does for their "open" models. Still, if vanity metrics wasn't so important, it'd be a great option. I've even thought of creating my own torrent mirror of HF to provide as a public service, as eventually access to models will be restricted, and it would be nice to be prepared for that moment a bit better.
- sowbug 8mo agoI thought of the tracking and gate questions, too, when I vibed up an HF torrent service a few nights ago. (Super annoying BTW to have to download the files just to hash the parts, especially when webseeds exist.) Model owners could disable or gate torrents the same way they gate the models, and HF could still measure traffic by .torrent downloads and magnet clicks. It's a bit like any legalization question -- the black market exists anyway, so a regulatory framework could bring at least some of it into the sunlight.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Model owners could disable or gate torrents the same way they gate the models, and HF could still measure traffic by .torrent downloads and magnet clicks. But that'll only stop a small part, anyone could share the infohash and if you're using the dht/magnet without .torrent files or clicks on a website, no one can count those downloads unless they too scrape the dht for peers who are reporting they've completed the download.
- sowbug 8mo ago
- Fin_Code 8mo agoI still don't know why they are not running on torrent. Its the perfect use case.
- heliumtera 8mo agoHow can you be the man in the middle in a truly P2P environment?
- freedomben 8mo agoThat would shut out most people working for big corp, which is probably a huge percentage of the user base. It's dumb, but that's just the way corp IT is (no torrenting allowed).
- zozbot234 8mo agoIt's a sensible option, even when not everyone can really use it. Linux distros are routinely transfered via torrent, so why not other massive, open-licensed data?
- freedomben 8mo agoOh as an option, yeah I agree it makes a ton of sense. I just would expect a very, very small percentage of people to use the torrent over the direct download. With Linux distros, the vast majority of downloads still come from standard web servers. When I download distro images I opt for torrents, but very few people do the same
- zrm 8mo agoWith Linux distros they typically put the web link right on the main page and have a torrent available if you go look for it, because they want you to try their distro more than they want to save some bandwidth. Suppose HF did the opposite because the bandwidth saved is more and they're not as concerned you might download a different model from someone else.
- Const-me 8mo ago
- Tepix 8mo agoIt's insane how much traffic HF must be pushing out of the door. I routinely download models that are hundreds of gigabytes in size from them. A fantastic service to the sovererign AI community.
- vardalab 8mo agoYup, I have downloaded probably a terabyte in the last week, especially with the Step 3.5 model being released and Minimax quants. I wonder what my ISP thinks. I hope they don't cut me off. They gave me a fast lane, they better let me use it, lol
- fc417fc802 8mo agoEven fairly restrictive data caps are in the range of 6 Tb per month. P2P at a mere 100 Mb works out to 1 TiB per 24 hours. Hypothetically my ISP will sell me unmetered 10 Gb service but I wonder if they would actually make good on their word ...
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo agoI have a 1.2TB cap before you start getting charged extra, so you might need to recalibrate your restrictive level.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoIs that with a WISP by chance? Or in a developing country? Or are there really wired providers with such low caps in the western world in this day and age?