[HN Gopher] Hugging Face and AWS partner to make AI more accessible
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Hugging Face and AWS partner to make AI more accessible
Author : rjtavares
Score : 83 points
Date : 2023-02-21 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huggingface.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (huggingface.co)
| 1024core wrote:
| Next headline: HugingFace agrees to be acquired by Amazon.
| WhatsName wrote:
| That's unfortunate. I liked hugging face. Could have been the
| next github for ML.
|
| Hope the push to the AWS walled garden doesn't eat them alive.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| I don't really understand how this announcement will prevent
| them from becoming the next github for ML.
|
| This is about making it easier to run huggingface models in
| AWS.
| nkozyra wrote:
| That's how it starts, isn't it?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >becoming the next github for ML.
|
| Considering github digested all the open source code into a
| proprietary AI...
| Casteil wrote:
| One AI to rule them all
|
| (sorry)
| tootie wrote:
| There's nothing to indicate this means they will be exclusive
| to Amazon. Only that they'll add some integrations or even just
| pricing consideration for AWS customers.
| babelfish wrote:
| Not an acquisition, just a product
| burna_aws_acct wrote:
| ... all the way to slaughter.
| burna_aws_acct wrote:
| Same. Pretty bummed. I like HuggingFace, but there's no such
| thing as "partnership" when Amazon's involved.
|
| Amazon has a clear reputation of "brand killer" (e.g., Zappos,
| IMDb, 6pm, WholeFoods, ComiXology, GoodReads, Roomba, Ring,
| Eufy, Woot, Sleep Jar, Fabric.com, Shopbop, Graphiq). Very much
| "if you can't beat'em, eat'em," although I sometimes wonder if
| it's negligence more than strategy. After all, their own
| services don't even work half the time (e.g., Prime Video and
| Music, Alexa), and its retail site is overrun with fake goods
| with fake reviews.
|
| Good luck, HuggingFace. You'll need it, along with an active
| team of lawyers and a backup repo in Azure.
|
| Edit: Adding additional sentiment below.
|
| I desperately wish what I said above wasn't true. I am in no
| way faulting employees who work(-ed) on these projects with
| best of intentions. Persons who have endured understand, the
| problem is above, not necessarily below. Again I will strongly
| encourage HuggingFace to have backups and lawyers. Please don't
| give everything away; there is no good faith at present.
| zachlatta wrote:
| I believe the examples you're highlighting were acquisitions,
| not partnerships. This seems more along the lines of
| https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/amazon-and-stripe
| burna_aws_acct wrote:
| I will say this. Many acquisitions begin as partnerships.
|
| Shall we begin to unearth the "partnership" with Stripe,
| and its impact to customers? Perhaps a necessary discussion
| worth continuing elsewhere, e.g.,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34863530...
| nothrowaways wrote:
| The world is at war- Amazon burning compute resources on hugging
| face to fight MSFT.
|
| Same way as US doing with missiles, if you know what I mean.
|
| Jokes aside, hugging face is the real open AI in the space and
| desperately needs this.
| derbOac wrote:
| Ideally I'd like to see more work on decentralized AI/DL methods.
| Maybe that's out there (I should dig into it more than I have)
| but either way I think it needs more attention.
| Sophira wrote:
| I don't see any mention of what Amazon are actually doing for
| this partnership. other than providing the same services they
| provide for everyone.
|
| This reads like "Amazon gave us a bunch of money for us to use
| and promote AWS."
| karmasimida wrote:
| Unless Google or MSFR buying huggingface upfront, this is going
| to eventually make sure AWS be the fist class citizen for
| future huggingface initiatives
|
| Including all open source models
| burna_aws_acct wrote:
| This is correct. All of a sudden, we'll see "Amazon state-of-
| the-art Natural Understanding systems paving the way [blah blah
| blah]"... Umm... No. It's HuggingFace. And just like that,
| HuggingFace fades away; its well-earned recognition reassigned
| to Amazon, by Amazon. It's not a possibility; it's a certainty.
|
| Shout out to Amazon though. People keep falling for the
| "partnership promise." The wax must be hella poetic.
| brianjking wrote:
| and that's almost certainly what's happened, lol.
| locknessness wrote:
| Disclaimer: I used to work for AWS ML
|
| Buried in the press release is the announcement that there will
| be a push to bring up models on the AWS Trainium accelerator.
|
| In the name of "ML democratization" this agreement could help
| shift tides away from the Nvidia HW + SW monopoly. Amazon (trn1)
| and Google (TPU) are little guys compared to Nvidia.
|
| The book may already be written. Pytorch is heavily biased
| towards libraries that are customized for cuda/Nvidia (see FSDP).
| This leaves the other HW folks playing SW catch-up, with everyone
| rallying behind the open source XLA compiler.
|
| It's too bad the press release didn't touch on these points and
| used cliche rhetoric instead.
| arcatech wrote:
| Funny how both OpenAI and now Hugging Face promise "openness" for
| their AI tools so that they're "accessible to everyone" and then
| both partner with big tech companies who are trying to control
| and monetize as much as they can.
| axegon_ wrote:
| There's a world of difference between OpenAI and Hugging Face.
| OpenAI simply has the word "open" in their name, while there is
| nothing open about them. Hugging Face on the other hand
| deserves a ton of credit and praise in that regard. It's
| perfectly fine for a company of that nature to partner with a
| big player(whether that be Microsoft or AWS or Google or
| whatever): infrastructure is not free, nor is it cheap. Of
| course AWS and Microsoft have a lot to gain from this, which is
| also fine for that exact reason. So long as the community
| continues to exist and have the ability to use, extend and
| participate, I don't see anything wrong.
|
| Moreover, Hugging Face has made it stupid simple for anyone to
| use. So Microsoft, AWS or Google, all I can say is bravo,
| Hugging Face and thanks for your work.
| enoreyes wrote:
| Hugging Face internally has a lot of very strong believers
| (including the exec team) in open source + decentralized
| approach towards AI as the only safe and productive way
| forward. HF is ostensibly the only place to find deep+broad
| resources for open source DL and transformers/diffusers are the
| libraries du jour of open DL.
|
| Compute is really important for AI, and having a cloud provider
| align themselves with an organization which is genuinely trying
| to be "Open" AI is I think a positive step forward.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Leadership is fungible,everyone has a price, and words are
| innevitably wind.
|
| I would consider this a solid step in the direction agaisnt
| why huggingface is actually useful.
| enoreyes wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your first point, but as I see it -
| this only enables HF to continue to spend money on making
| good open source tooling + doing research on open
| alternatives to closed source LLMs (something sorely
| needed), while opening them up to more enterprise customers
| who primarily use AWS.
|
| FWIW I am an ML engineer there (maybe should have disclosed
| earlier) and I feel pretty optimistic about the
| opportunities this will enable for the open source
| community. Maybe with the visibility into the closed door
| discussions I have a more positive attitude, or maybe I'm
| being naive.
|
| Time will tell!
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Huggingface started off as GitHub for machine learning and
| anyone can download the models there. OpenAI has everything
| behind a black box where you don't exactly know what actually
| happening.
|
| Then to monetize they host the models you want to use at a cost
| which would be a good investment for Amazon but you can still
| self host using their libraries.
| [deleted]
| synergy20 wrote:
| does AWS provide a google colab alike environment, colab is now
| sign-in then using it, AWS you have to jump so many hoops to
| start using it, could be easier to access.
| amrrs wrote:
| Check out AWS Sage maker studio Lab
| SamSkjord wrote:
| And when you delete the Sagemaker domain, remember to also
| delete everything associated with it under the Lifecycle
| configuration... that was an expensive weekend
| synergy20 wrote:
| isn't sagemaker studio lab fully free?
|
| it's said colab is easier to use, but sagemaker studio lab
| provides better hardware underneath.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree that Google Colab is so much nicer to use, but if you
| already use AWS, have accounts and access control already
| setup, the SageMaker Studio is OK to use also.
|
| It is usually easy to take existing Jupiter notebooks and run
| them on either platform, assuming data is easily accessible.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Thanks. Not aware of this until now. Just registered, seems
| cool.
|
| Trying to compare it with colab on the freemium plan, I guess
| they must be close to each other(how long you can run a
| sesssion,how much cpu/gpu resource you can use for free,etc)
| shashanoid wrote:
| Lame. Everyone keep getting sold to the same shitpile at the end
| of the day.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Well, with the current climate it's not far fetched to try to
| milk something out of it and cash out before the ship starts
| sinking.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| My startup computes everything locally. We use our own hardware.
|
| If we'll ever get to the point where we need serious dynamic
| scaling, sure, we'll use cloud-tooling. But for now, cloud-
| compute has zero alignment with our vision and strategy. AWS is
| powerful and surely has its place, but "run it on Bezos'
| hardware" doesn't exactly spark confidence in "open" or
| "democratized" AI progress.
|
| One thing I love about Huggingface is that I can simply download
| a model and do stuff with it. Iirc, I couldn't download some
| models and was instead incentivized to use Sage Maker (maybe only
| for finetuning? I don't recall exactly) recently.
|
| I deeply hope that this partnership doesn't become a "to use
| models hosted by huggingface, you must use AWS". The fact that
| this announcement reeks of business speak ("Together, the two
| leaders aim to accelerate [...]") leaves a bad feeling in my
| mouth.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Did I miss a memo somewhere that said "every single AI related
| announcement must pretend as if you are bringing peace to the
| world and solving all forms of inequality forever"? I mean come
| on, "democratize machine learning"? Even the langauge of
| "accessible" which is constantly used by AI people over and over
| is just absurd.
|
| It feels like whoever wrote this mashed together Social Justice
| Words until they got something intelligable. Example:
|
| >"The future of AI is here, but it's not evenly distributed,"
| said Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. "Accessibility and
| transparency are the keys to sharing progress and creating tools
| to use these new capabilities wisely and responsibly. Amazon
| SageMaker and AWS-designed chips will enable our team and the
| larger machine learning community to convert the latest research
| into openly reproducible models that anyone can build on."
| Zetice wrote:
| I agree completely with this sentiment. I don't want to create
| great new works of literature, I just wanna label some text
| with metadata and learn the bare minimum about some random tech
| I'm supposed to use next quarter.
|
| I predict the next year will be companies promising AI will fix
| everything wrong about my life, and approximately zero will
| deliver. The companies who will do well will be the companies
| who don't even advertise their AI use, but incorporate it into
| their existing value prop.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Huggingface has done more to democratize ML than any other
| entity in our field except maybe the folks making sklearn and
| other high profile tools. They get to use this kind of
| language, stop critisizing them for it as though they aren't
| really the only bastion of openness we have. They really are
| the only one's doing what they do.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > I mean come on, "democratize machine learning"?
|
| That slogan made more sense back when Hugging Face first
| launched in 2019 and training models was prohibitively
| expensive and required sorting through poor model training
| codebases, but nowadays it's less applicable. (cost/efficiency
| of GPUs is _much_ better and lots of higher level libraries,
| including Hugging Face 's transformers, reduces a lot of the
| pain)
| [deleted]
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I get what you're saying but I'd put hugging face as an
| exception. When I read democratizing access, I see a company
| making models freely available to the masses who do not
| necessarily have the resources to train them themselves. Is it
| solving global poverty or hunger? No of course not. Is it
| helping to tear down the ivory tower of academia or fill in the
| moats surrounding megacorps? Yes.
|
| But now they're just another cog in a megacorp..
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