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by Der_Einzige 1064 days ago
Huggingface + Transformers is and has been since at least 2018 the atlas holding up the rest of the NLP and pretty much all of the AI community.

Their unwavering commitment to open-source should be celebrated by all tech enthusiasts. Not sure why people poo-poo on them.

4 comments

People who dislike things are just so much more vocal than people who like them. I've used Huggingface extensively, they are trying to do a lot, but its always been the most convenient/flexible for my finetuning use cases.

Thank you Huggingface!

Yes, I'm a huge fan of Huggingface. There's a tendency to always distrust anybody that is a company that is trying to make money. But "makes some money with some of their product offerings" != "is incapable of producing valuable resources." It's always a balance, but I think Huggingface is doing well at both being a huge resource for the NLP community and having a viable business that allows them to keep being such a resource.
The code is very enterprise oriented and reads more like Java than Python. Bootstrapping a VC backed company off of open source is a known strategy for achieving growth needed for future funding and acquisition.

At some point, all the nice things they offer for free or cheaper will go away or become expensive.

Bloated does not mean bad. It means bloated. Which, for my purposes, makes it not the best choice.