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.
It'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.
> 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.
Why 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.
I still don't know why they are not running on torrent. Its the perfect use case.
Can 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.