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> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that cont

by codemog 21d ago

> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation. Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival. But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.

6bb32646d83d 20d ago
A good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality
- gedy 13d ago
  For the founders maybe, rarely the employees. (No not employee #2, etc)
- aatd86 20d ago
  It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha. (half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
- jvwww 19d ago
  Yeah exactly. I remember speaking to someone working at a YC company who was complaining about the quality of their codebase. I then asked him if the company was making a lot of money - he said yes, it was super successful.
pizza 20d ago
They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?
- dpoloncsak 15d ago
  I think both can be true at the same time. They provided insane value, and while I'm not sure if they were first, they were most people's introduction during the initial LLM boom. Their code was also sloppy, and the org was mismanaged. Sometimes, success really is just 'right place, right time'
pc86 20d ago
I wonder if they had been more pure technically, would have they been acquired for more than $13 billion? Less? Acquired at all?
AntiqueFig 20d ago
> But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI. Yeah probably more like the frontier of early retirement.
fantispug 20d ago
Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier. When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment. BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software. Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right. I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.
- MachineMan 20d ago
  From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.
Der_Einzige 20d ago
You mean DRY as in the LLM sampling technique "Don't repeat yourself"?

by codemog 21d ago

6bb32646d83d 20d ago

A good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality

gedy 13d ago
For the founders maybe, rarely the employees. (No not employee #2, etc)
aatd86 20d ago
It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha. (half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
jvwww 19d ago
Yeah exactly. I remember speaking to someone working at a YC company who was complaining about the quality of their codebase. I then asked him if the company was making a lot of money - he said yes, it was super successful.

pizza 20d ago

They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?

dpoloncsak 15d ago
I think both can be true at the same time. They provided insane value, and while I'm not sure if they were first, they were most people's introduction during the initial LLM boom. Their code was also sloppy, and the org was mismanaged. Sometimes, success really is just 'right place, right time'

pc86 20d ago

I wonder if they had been more pure technically, would have they been acquired for more than $13 billion? Less? Acquired at all?

AntiqueFig 20d ago

> But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI. Yeah probably more like the frontier of early retirement.

fantispug 20d ago

Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier. When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment. BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software. Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right. I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.

MachineMan 20d ago
From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.

Der_Einzige 20d ago

You mean DRY as in the LLM sampling technique "Don't repeat yourself"?