I'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
I had a similar idea for something like hugging face in 2016. (I feel so stupid I didn't execute)
My business model was that people with great models trained on proprietary data sets would buy & sell trained weights and fine tuned models for private use.
Here is an example.
No e-commerce business is going to easily publish their sales data for everyone to train so they can build a great model for optimizing recommendations of products.
Hiring an internal AI team may have 2 problems.
- It may cost too much
- May not work as well
- You may not have the appropriate data set or data size (DL is very data intensive).
For a small fraction of what it may cost to hire your own team. You may buy a fine tuned models or readily trained weights that you just "plug & play".
That sounds like reasonable model.
The client (e-commerce) saves money, time, is guaranteed success, and gets the bonus productivity output from AI integration.
What do you guys think? Tarpit idea?
If I owned hugging face, I would follow such a strategy.
I’m not entirely sure but I suspect through their ML hosting/inference/training products and services they have working with enterprises. But I’m still baffled how they cover their AWS storage and egress fees :)
I remember seeing a post last week-ish from Julien Chaumond that they are profitable.
That is a well known lesson. In any goldrush it is always profitable to sell pickaxes and spades to the miners. The miners themselves generally do less well (except the happy few that strike gold)
