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by kolinko 1173 days ago
The basic simple (web) solutions were built over the last 10-20 years - of course not everything was invented yet, but if there is a need for such a product, there is a high chance the product was already built, and the niche filled.

Perhaps a better question is what new niches now open up, on top of the AI solutions.

Hugging Face is a nice example - it's mostly a python library, a github clone, and a discussion forum strapped together. "Old" tech used to serve a new and growing niche.
1 comments
geraltofrivia 1173 days ago
HuggingFace is also hosting models (CLI/code/API), have an extensive community driven dataset store, and has some great positive feedback loops.

Great Library -> Large Community -> Large Coverage of Models & Datasets -> Larger Community -> Larger Coverage of Models & Datasets -> Revenue -> More Engineers -> Greater Library ...

Not all the steps (->) here are trivial: Contrast HF to Explosion (great folks behind spacy).

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banditelol 1173 days ago
> Not all the steps (->) here are trivial: Contrast HF to Explosion (great folks behind spacy).

Can you elaborate more on this? about contrasting HF to Explosion?

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geraltofrivia 1173 days ago
Explosion's core contribution (not moneymakers) is the great SpaCy library they first released in 2015. It was an excellent work, far better designed (IMO) than NLTK and other offerings at the time. Of course the library isn't monetized. SpaCy too has the ability to train custom models and use them.

This never transformed into a model hub. Despite a lot of people using SpaCy and probably building custom models.

Again in contrast, Explosion's other revenue stream (prodigy) is not a SaaS as well. Its a great software, and I presume it brings in a steady income. But in 2023, I would imagine that HF's LLM hosting, cloud training environment, brings in more money than Explosion's data annotation software.

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z3c0 1173 days ago
I'll also add that Explosion has a heavy "production-ready, quickly" bent, and even supports wrapping HF models with spaCy. Explosion is probably my favorite company in the AI space and has provided the most tangible value of all the NLP tools I've used.
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