Is there something unique about hugging face that the models cannot be hosted elsewhere? I see open source as more important to Nvidia than anyone else because it sells hardware. The services’ motivations are only partially aligned with Nvidia.

I think it’s mainly just the huge amount of storage. Huggingface has been burning venture capital money for the insane among of storage space they need, afaik

I don’t see how they could be burning considerable amounts of money on storage, as long as they have setup their own infrastructure and don’t rent it.

I don’t know how much they’re storing, I guess they’re in the petabyte territory. That’s what, a few tens of millions of dollars of up front investment?

Not free, but not such a huge amount of money.

All they do is store tho, they dont profit off that I imagine, I honestly have no clue

Probably hoping to do what GitHub did. Profit of the metrics of who is downloading what, who is developing what and having everyone uploading all their stuff to them.

Microsoft didn’t buy GitHub for the storage and bandwidth bills.

NVidia isn’t buying huggingface for the storage and bandwidth bills either

I’ve never understood why they don’t seed torrents for those huge files. So much money on bandwidth that they just don’t need to spend.

Because the authors may want to take down their models or change the datasets after the fact probably.

Not that it removes from users computers, but at least the primary source can be made unavailable at will

Then remove or update the torrent link, just like any other link.

Porn