[HN Gopher] Hugging Face Acquires Gradio
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Hugging Face Acquires Gradio
Author : aliabd
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-12-16 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gradio.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (gradio.app)
| minimaxir wrote:
| It's interesting that for Hugging Face Spaces that Gradio beat
| out the more-established/more VC-backed Streamlit, despite many
| functional and API similarities (I haven't used both enough to
| explicitly compare/contrast).
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Is it only me that transposes Hugging Face to Face Hugger? [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc...
| dvirsky wrote:
| Me too, I had to see the emoji for it to click that it's not an
| Alien reference.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| This is 100% what I think of. I have no idea what this company
| does but the name is terrible and terrible names kill good
| companies.
| nerdponx wrote:
| As I understand, it's a reference to the Hugging Face emoji,
| which is supposed to be a kind of emblem for the complexity
| and promise of natural language processing. Or something like
| that, anyway.
| hwers wrote:
| Both seem like such weird products to me. As soon as you build
| something that people would find useful the thing becomes
| unusable with a 10 day queue since apps are only granted CPU
| resources. The only reason I see for the flood of people making
| thing on there is the heavy amount somewhat annoying amount of
| attention they grab for on twitter etc. Just a weird thing in my
| eyes.
| abidlabs wrote:
| If I (as a Gradio founder) can offer a different perspective:
| most apps on Hugging Face Spaces are not designed for
| production-level traffic. Instead, it might be a researcher who
| wants to share a demo of their model for reproducibility
| purposes, a student who's built a class project, or a hobbyist
| interested in building out a portfolio. For most of these
| projects, writing a simple gradio application and hosting on
| Spaces is the easiest way to share their machine learning
| model.
| GrayShade wrote:
| Mostly unrelated, but that sketch recognition demo on the landing
| page is worse [1] than the Xerox photocopier firmware from a
| while back [2].
|
| EDIT: to be fair, it does work slightly better on mobile.
|
| [1]: https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU.
|
| [2]: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
| workcentres...
| abidlabs wrote:
| Asking for clarification so that we can improve it -- is it
| that the UI is not usable, or is that the model predicts things
| inaccurately? If it's the latter, it might say more about the
| model (a convolutional network with high accuracy on the MNIST
| dataset) than Gradio
| BasilPH wrote:
| The UI is fine. The model seems to struggle with me drawing 6
| on desktop.
|
| Reading "Sketch Recognition" I was expecting something akin
| to Google draw which recognises objects like cars and trees.
| The digit classifier is of course fine, but I felt a bit
| disappointed when I realised it "only" does numbers. I also
| think it's the least impressive of the demos you have.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Probably not even the model, but the preprocessing - MNIST-
| trained models expect all the digits to have the same
| preprocessing that MNIST had (because that's all they saw),
| so if you apply a MNIST-optimized model directly to user-
| generated input without e.g. resizing and re-centering the
| images (or, alternatively, a "robustized" model trained with
| various data augmentations), then you're going to have
| horrible results.
| BasilPH wrote:
| Came here to say the same. When I draw a 6 on desktop, it
| doesn't even show up in the list of candidates.
| aliabd wrote:
| We posted gradio as a Show HN mid 2020 [1] :) Got a lot of good
| feedback and have been slowly growing ever since!
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834
| [deleted]
| abidlabs wrote:
| Particularly, one of the most useful feedback we heard early on
| was adding support for rendering the GUI in jupyter/colab
| notebooks. Extremely common use case (that also allowed us to
| distinguish ourselves from some competitors)
| nilsbunger wrote:
| I got to work with the Gradio founders as an early investor. They
| are a fantastic ML team, and they really leaned into doing lots
| of customer outreach to find their market. Congrats to Abu,
| Ali^2, Dawood, and the team; well-deserved and excited for the
| next phase of your journey.
| abidlabs wrote:
| Very grateful to you and Pear for the all the lessons on
| talking to customers. Will remember for a long time!
| aliabd wrote:
| Thank you Nils! We were very fortunate to work with you and all
| of the awesome people at Pear!
| Reubend wrote:
| Forgive me for the somewhat disparaging comment, but Gradio's
| product seems very basic to be. Can anyone shed some light on why
| HF felt the need to acquire them, rather than to just build their
| own version? Is there really so much complexity there that it was
| quicker to just acquire?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Consider that they could have been bought for $1.
| roseway4 wrote:
| Possibly an acquihire? Pure conjecture: They may have had
| difficulty competing with Streamlit[0] and decided to throw in
| the towel.
|
| [0] https://streamlit.io/
| andreyk wrote:
| Gradio is already integrated to some extent to HF's platform,
| and nothing is as trivial to build as it seems. So it just made
| sense to buy an existing refined solution and to hit the ground
| running rather than build from scratch.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe it's an "acqui-hire".
| laGrenouille wrote:
| I agree about the product; perhaps they were acquired for the
| people rather than the actual IP. Would make sense from that
| perspective for HF, which has leaned strongly in the text
| direction, if they want to expand in the AI space.
| minimaxir wrote:
| HF has expanded beyond text into image/video; gradio can do
| multimedia I/O.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| This was a given if you follow this space closely - surprised it
| took this long.
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