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Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would c
by matesz 1mo ago
Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- raincole 1mo agoWhy is any file hosting service ever a thing at all, when literally any file can simply be distributed via torrents?
- sgt101 1mo agoThere's a herding effect with torrents where popular things are quick to get, unpopular things may be very difficult to get, because the majority of users delete files to save space. I might host 3 or 4 models that I've downloaded recently, but I won't be hosting the 50 or so that I've tried in the last two years.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- debugnik 1mo agoAnd who seeds it? If you're going to pay a host to seed it, they might as well just provide HTTP and let you add them as a web seed to your torrent, which we could be doing already. But if you don't pay a host to seed it, either the host's business model won't play well with torrents, or there's no host and a torrent will rot.
- raincole 1mo ago(It was a retrospective question.)
- rbreve 1mo agoTorrents are unreliable, also for an agent or script it's easier to just do wget model
- hirako2000 1mo agoIt would be far more efficient to decentralize the data. But HF provides convenience, they subsidize the cost. They gained millions of users, and many enterprises. They can now sell the popularity of their platform. Nobody can buy a p2p network of people.
- CodinM 1mo agoVery "why would anyone use Dropbox when I can setup a SFTP server" vibes.
- madaxe_again 1mo agoOr even “why would I pay for a flight when I can simply walk across the country” It’s all about the convenience, minimising the time and effort from “looks interesting” to “running the model”. Nvidia don’t care if you do it on their cloud, someone else’s cloud, or on your own machine - they win either way, as it further propagates the technology on which they are building their future.
- unleaded 1mo agoTorrents aren't that scary. If you have the patience for local AI you can figure out qBitTorrent in less than an hour.
- madaxe_again 1mo agoTorrents are trivial. Each individual bit is trivial. But being able to click a button that says “run model” is even more trivial.
- ActorNightly 1mo agohugging face is basically a real easy way to run llms. They also provide a bunch of libraries to do things like split compute across all your resources.
- FeepingCreature 1mo agoThe important thing about HuggingFace isn't the safetensors files, it's the READMEs and the Google search placement. It's easy to reproduce their distribution with torrents, it's very hard to then establish yourself as the default option.
- unleaded 1mo agoYou are not the first or 100th person to come up with this idea. I don't really get it either but there must be a reason it hasn't really happened.
- alpineman 1mo agoWhy don't we use message boards instead of Google? Couldn't websites be distributed via direct DNS requests instead of Google serving links?
- andruby 1mo agoThen someone would still create a website with an index of all the open models. Where people discuss & rank the models, show related models, ... And now you've recreated most of HF
- asimovDev 1mo agobeating the dead horse after other dozen comments, but the same reason we use github / gitlab instead of using Savannah
- walrus01 1mo ago> Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Because you can't host arbitrarily large files on github, it's basically become a defacto "publish your project here" thing. For a CN domestic equivalent take a look at Modelscope.
- jsiepkes 1mo agoWell, ask yourself: "Why am I on Hacker News?". You could just "as easy" use free / opensource alternatives like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.