ELI5 huggingface?
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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ngl the first image on their website is pretty much all the explanation you need
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hosts all the ai models and is the primary resource for downloading them for pretty much all kinds, like depthmaps, masking too, also llms, inage generators, etc.
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I fail to understand the use of the term open source when the resource itself can be bought by oligarchs. Like organic vegetables, or clean coal.
I've downloaded a terabyte worth of models and didn't pay a cent. storage and bandwidth cost money
I just put together a budget starter PC for local inference. I guess this is my cue to set up and get downloading.
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Ed Zitron is going to have an aneurysm.
Get ready for the model purge
Is there something unique about hugging face that the models cannot be hosted elsewhere? I see open source as more important to Nvidia than anyone else because it sells hardware. The servicesβ motivations are only partially aligned with Nvidia.
I think it's mainly just the huge amount of storage. Huggingface has been burning venture capital money for the insane among of storage space they need, afaik
I've never understood why they don't seed torrents for those huge files. So much money on bandwidth that they just don't need to spend.
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I don't see how they could be burning considerable amounts of money on storage, as long as they have setup their own infrastructure and don't rent it.
I don't know how much they're storing, I guess they're in the petabyte territory. That's what, a few tens of millions of dollars of up front investment?
Not free, but not such a huge amount of money.
All they do is store tho, they dont profit off that I imagine, I honestly have no clue
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Ahhhh, this is what they meant by "the circular economy"
It's more of a reverse funnel system. A pyramid scheme, if you will.
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I know huggingface. I don't know of anything they sell, though.
Real money or pretend AI money
That's the neat thing, none of it's real, and the AI investment bubble is going to make that very clear in the near future.
Or so people have been saying for the past 3 years.
My question is what their motivation is.
- Do they want to close down open models so more is directed at the frontier/closed companies (OpenAI/Anthropic)?
- Or are they trying to diversify and push open models as a safety net for when the bubble bursts
The latter sounds like the smarter move, so it's probably the former.
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Oh no we have to get decent local models from somewhere else now.
this site seems to be better than others ive seen : https://llama.garden/
complaints - the torrents are packs of all different quants .. or some are just safetensor files.
And this will be why the Chinese models will win.
The Ouroboros must be fed!
https://www.modelscope.cn/home
Not as many (old?) models though. https://presenc.ai/research/modelscope-vs-huggingface-2026
One of the few AI orgs of note outside of China and the US. What's left? Black Forest?
This doesn't sound like it will help the trout population.
AFAIK that's about 2 weeks revenue. IDK what their profit margin is, but I bet it's high.