If you’re interested in trying out a new generative AI model, you have a few options. Some developers offer their own web services, such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic. However, many open-source developers don’t provide this option. This is where Hugging Face comes in.
No downloads or installs needed. Hugging Face has made it incredibly easy to access a variety of AI programs. The platform, which has a somewhat similar interface to GitHub, hosts a variety of models. This allows users to easily select and utilize them as if they were running on their own computer.
The number of models has increased dramatically in recent months. | Image: Hugging Face
More than a million AI models. Ars Technica reports the platform already has more than a million AI models available, which highlights the vast number of projects that have emerged since ChatGPT started the generative AI boom.
It started as a chatbot. Interestingly, Hugging Face started as a limited AI chatbot in 2016. In 2020, two years before the launch of ChatGPT, the company shifted its focus to become a hub for AI models with an open-source philosophy. The number of models on the platform has grown significantly, especially since the beginning of 2023. Last year, Hugging Face even launched Hugging Chat, its own open-source competitor to ChatGPT.
Big and small models. Clement Delangue, the company’s co-founder and CEO, recently celebrated one of Hugging Face’s big achievements on X. The platform now provides access to large models (such as Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Stable Diffusion, Grok, and Whisper) and 999,984 other smaller projects.
Long live specialized models. Delangue rejects the idea of “one model to rule them all.” He believes that “smaller specialized, customized, [and] optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware, and generally your constraints are better.”
Forks all over the place. The process of tuning and customizing models has increased the number of available models. Many models start from a common base and then undergo modifications and “fine-tuning” processes. This results in derived models similar to the “forks” of software projects. Llama, Meta’s LLM, is a good example of this: Numerous models have been derived from it and adjusted for specific use cases.
About everything and for everyone. On Hugging Face, you can find models to suit everyone’s preferences. Some models offer traditional text chatbots and variations dedicated to text processing. Other specialized models are designed for image classification and object detection.
The list of the most downloaded and used models reflects the great variety available. The top model is used for classifying audio content, while the second most popular model, Google’s BERT, is used in language modeling projects.
Image | Hugging Face
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