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by joshcryer
1505 days ago
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Hugging Face is selling CPU cycles. They're also letting you upload your own datasets that aren't "limited" like others. I'm not quite sure where you think their approach of "open models" is wrong, they still sell the CPU cycles. The idea that restricting access to the data is the only way to profit is such an archaic way of thinking. Hugging Face, if they keep making a good user interface and a good front end, will very much be able to fill the niche it is designed for: people who can't afford a $10-20k rig to run a model but who need to run it for their backend project. Also, it may be due to using HN, but when I think of "where can I run a model" or "get a dataset" I think Hugging Face. They are leveraging the democratization of the data. |
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I see the niche. The risks are:
- the mid market is constantly churning; either players become too big and you can't meet their requirements or they go bankrupt. Customer acquisition becomes a pretty big expense.
- selling CPU cycles is a cutthroat business which competes pretty directly with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Their edge will likely be ease of use, but at some scale, the larger providers will be able to undercut them hard.
- selling a solution for managing datasets and training models using cloud CPUs is a crowded market.
- not sure how trustworthy the company is with private datasets. Easier to trust an established vendor.
But it wouldn't be a startup if there weren't risks.