HuggingBay to the rescue 🏴‍☠️

Get ready for the model purge

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

Remember, the whole AI scheme exists to take the very concept of ownership from us. This takeover is hostile.

There are worse things than copyrights not mattering anymore.

Forget about rights as a whole for us plebs.

To the one Downvoter I’m curious, why are you such a little bitch?

This comment got so much misintepreted lmao

Now there are 6 of them.

Probably cause it’s a dumb comment, you people see conspiracies everywhere.

Correct. There’s no “laughing at the idiot” button, so the downvote button has to fill in.

That was hardly conspiracy worthy. It’s a bit hyperbolic, but it’s a fairly legit concern. Big tech is not the friend of any consumer. And big tech buying literally anything ends up a net negative for the consumer and freedom of choice. There is evidence that tech oligarchs (openAI/Sam Altman) want to gatekeep even knowledge and charge a subscription to access it.

Huggingface is now absolutely going to become pay to play. Maybe not day one, but it will happen. Just like all the other services out there that are now subscription based that were once free and offer little to justify the move. It’s also likely to drop AMD development or at least deprioritize it so hard they may as well.

There are also movements in the industry that suggest these big tech companies want to push a move to thinclients connected to cloud services instead of local machines. This idea isn’t helped by companies like Sony stripping away physical media. Nor by the RAM manufacturing cartel colluding for overpricing and abandonment of consumer markets.

Conspiracies are only conspiracies until they come to pass, and not all conspiracies are unfounded tripe like flat earthers etc.

Why do we need a centralized hub for AI models anyway? I’ve never figured this out. We flock to these big “friendly” fucking companies with obviously unsustainable business models trying to own and sell things that should be shared in a decentralized, democratized mesh anyway. AI models should all be distributed magnet links, not hosted files. Why do we do this to ourselves?

The way things are going at Huggingface now, I imagine we probably will have to start building the infrastructure we need to handle AI models as distributed links sooner rather than later. Let the enshittification begin, we’ll move on to a different tactic for sharing AI models while cheerfully they squeeze cash out of people and businesses too lazy to adapt. Everything working as it should, I guess.

For real, this is the perfect application for torrent. If I were building a registry that had to have sustainable cost for an open source community it would use torrents as a file transfer backend. If I were building something that I was planning to sell to a monopoly firm that has monopoly money… HTTP and cloud storage all thw way! 😄

The way things are going at Huggingface now, I imagine we probably will have to start building the infrastructure we need to handle AI models as distributed links sooner rather than later.

Then “we” better get started. Mega corpos have fully embraced LLMs, to the point that they’ve distrusted human input too much, which is still a vital component of successful adoption. Eventually, more and more companies will wise up and figure out how to find the right balance.

Where are we at? Oh, right… we’re too busy arguing about how all AI is bad and sticking our fucking heads in the sand until the Big Bad AI Problem goes away.

We have to fix our attitudes if we have any hope of surviving this mess and not ending up as a Cyberpunk-wannabe dystopia by the time 2077 hits. Use the fucking weapons given to us!

Sounds about right, my friend. I’ll meet you in the Badlands with the other nomads after the blackwall goes up!

They should put up a back up torrent of all the currently available models before transferring ownership. Thus opening the doors for future websites.

NVIDIA is probably trying to shutdown the LLM-at-home market (which means you don’t need huge clouds of graphics cards or even an Internet connection). Sad day for people who like to control their data.

I heard somewhere they are buying it because their own development platform sucks. So they are going to replace it with hugging face.

Which doesn’t preclude them from locking all the good stuff behind a subscription, of course.

Maybe a dev fee to post

Before any of these news I would use modelscope occasionally, it is the same thing as huggingface but Chinese and with a massive collection of mcp servers. Although they do not have the same amount of merged and fine tuned models, they are still a pretty good service

Nvidia also sells super expensive graphics cards. They probably want you to buy a couple of 5090s or a Spark.

They know they can’t shut down the entire self hosted LLM market but they can direct it towards using Nvidia GPUs by making sure llama.cpp devs don’t spend much time on ROCm support, etc. And they probably know that ClosedAI and Anthropic’s days on the frontier are limited.

We just can’t have nice things can we.

HuggingBay to the rescue 🏴‍☠️

You wouldn’t pirate a model

oh that’s actually a thing, neat

Holy shit it’s real LOL

We are in a war with the rich. Always have been. We will never have nice things unless you take it from them.

I fail to understand the use of the term open source when the resource itself can be bought by oligarchs. Like organic vegetables, or clean coal.

I’ve downloaded a terabyte worth of models and didn’t pay a cent. storage and bandwidth cost money

I just put together a budget starter PC for local inference. I guess this is my cue to set up and get downloading.

It was open source till the ones who has the keys (which shouldn’t be a thing for FOSS in the first place) got an offer that made their greed take over. It’s a thing that keeps happening and it needs to be a very strong lesson that anything open source needs to be handled in a way where no one can do this.

AFAIK that’s about 2 weeks revenue. IDK what their profit margin is, but I bet it’s high.

www.modelscope.cn/home

Not as many (old?) models though. presenc.ai/…/modelscope-vs-huggingface-2026

Real money or pretend AI money

That’s the neat thing, none of it’s real, and the AI investment bubble is going to make that very clear in the near future.

Or so people have been saying for the past 3 years.

Bubbles need to grow to pop

And this will be why the Chinese models will win.

One of the few AI orgs of note outside of China and the US. What’s left? Black Forest?

My question is what their motivation is.

• Do they want to close down open models so more is directed at the frontier/closed companies (OpenAI/Anthropic)?
• Or are they trying to diversify and push open models as a safety net for when the bubble bursts

The latter sounds like the smarter move, so it's probably the former.

To stop a competitor from getting the same kind of control. Particularly if its one of the foreign (to US) ones that’s less amenable to whatever US policy is on any given day.

One of the many reasons is likely to make sure models stay specifically optimized for NVidia hardware, by floating them to the top of the search results and making sure that they’re the only ones that get special prices on the tools and hosting. It’s such a fast-moving industry that they know they won’t always have the fastest chips indefinitely.

This doesn’t sound like it will help the trout population.

The Ouroboros must be fed!

Oh no we have to get decent local models from somewhere else now.

this site seems to be better than others ive seen : llama.garden
complaints - the torrents are packs of all different quants … or some are just safetensor models.

Ed Zitron is going to have an aneurysm.

Ahhhh, this is what they meant by “the circular economy”

Circular like this

It’s more of a reverse funnel system. A pyramid scheme, if you will.

Buys what?

Buys the ability to control open source model distribution.

Oh no.

The good news is that there’s nothing stopping us from starting a competitor. Nvidia probably wants to use it to push their graphics cards.

I know huggingface. I don’t know of anything they sell, though.

Neither does github

? Github can cost tons of money if you abuse runners

isn’t that just github?

I’ve worked at plenty of places with github enterprise subscriptions. They definitely sell things, you’re just not the consumer they care about.

seconded, they charge $21/month/seat if you’re using the pro features; that’s $50k a year even for a smallish team of 20, just to use their website. Once you get to a bigger company with 800 seats, that’s $1M over 5 years, for something that was mostly built on free OSS software to begin with.

Not to mention the biggest bait-and-switch in history that they pulled off on Github Copilot subscriptions, that I’m guessing a lot of big orgs won’t have cancelled yet. They really are laughing all the way to the bank.

20*21*12 is more than 50k?

github sold premium services.

then Microsoft bought it.

so back to DeepSeek it is…

So they are just slapping random price tags on things now. It’s a database of AI questions. They have paid 13 billion dollars for a database, and everyone’s acting like that’s a perfectly rational sensible thing to do. No one in the financial industry has any sense anymore.

A company that’s only product is something that people either don’t want or actively hate has paid an eye-watering amount of money for a database to train their product on, this training will have no effect whatsoever on whether people want it.

I have this nice bridge with lots of training examples if anybody’s interested, 100 trillion dollars please

for a database to train their product on

Isn’t hugging face a database of already trained models?

Partially. But they also host datasets.

not everyone has a hate boner for AI

It’s an expensive toy that might become a viable product in a decade that doesn’t mean it’s a valuable company today. Irresponsible spending like this is exactly what led to the dot com bubble.

its a useful tool for me doing research.

What kind of research do llms actually help with?

In my experience, if the answer can’t be found in the top google results, the AI simply makes shit up.

thats completely false when you only ask the llm a very basic question like “what color is the sun?” you need to talk to the model like its smarter than a google search engine. “what color is the sun? pull the data from scientific articles and other sites that study the sun”

if you google the first question, you will have list of different pages, where if you use AI to search on your query, it will model an answer from thoese sources, with said sources linked, similar to a Wikipedia page.

There are thousands of papers on the color of the sun, its trivial to google a paper, if you need an LLM to do this, that’s on you. But if you ask it valve clearances for an indonesian motorbike in english, it will make it up, even though the service manual is available in Indonesian. If you ask it how to synthesize a chemical that nobody bothers to write about because its uninteresting or impossible, it will straight up lie.

i think that learning to prompt AI is somthing people lack as a skill and then call it bad and a liar like its some intelligence when it isn’t

OK, instead of “lie”, I should have said it produces incorrect information any time the answer isn’t obvious from a cursory google search, and does so in a way that deceives anyone who isn’t already familiar enough with the subject that they didn’t need to ask in the first place.

It’s fine for asking it to generate answers you could have typed out yourself, such as boilerplate code and “what color is the sun”.

IMHO, the real problem is that it sounds just as “confident” whether the answer is accurate or not.

The fact that it lies is so irritating, if it at least admitted that it didn’t know the answer it would at least be a useful search engine. The fact that it makes stuff up though means I always have to scroll past the AI summary, that I didn’t ask for, in order to actually go to the website to check the results myself, because I can’t trust it.

The worst part is that mostly lies for things that aren’t immediately obvious, so you ask it “what is the color of the sun” and it appears to work just fine, but the moment you use it for any real research, it will just fabricate things wholecloth.

Yeah because it was impossible to Google things in the past. Every time anybody comes up with a use for AI it’s basically just automating something that isn’t even that hard for you to do. If you want to automate simple tasks that’s absolutely fine but it’s not the second coming as people keep insisting.

Come back to me when an AI can actually add value to something, when it can do something that is not just automating a simple task, but it’s capable of doing things that humans are not. I keep being told that we’re only a few years away from the technological singularity, so wake me up when we actually get there.

when it can do something that is not just automating a simple task, but it’s capable of doing things that humans are no

No, credit when credit’s due, LLMs have arrived (by themselves) or helped to arrive at some mathematical conclusions, didn’t they? A few of Erdős, some others. Yes, it’s, a very small subset (duh), out of god knows how many they tried, and achieving the solution is made via technique called “infinite monkeys typing out Hamlet”, but credit when credit’s due.

Yeah I knew you’d say something like that. Mean while the rest of the human race is busy getting on with existing and not worrying about hyper specific mathematical constructs that have no bearing on actual reality. Let me know when you come up with some kind of actual concrete used for the technology rather than some toy situation.

It saves immeasurable time. Your time may not be valuable, but mine is.

Yeah and another way to say that is my job is complicated enough they cannot be automated via lua script with ambition.

Rather than being an ass wipe why don’t you tell us what you are immensely important and easily automatable job is. And then I guess you can go find a new career, or something.

I’ve posted examples in the past, enema bag. No new career necessary. My current career, attained with an MSc in Machine Learning, is serving me just fine.

Yeah I don’t understand these valuations at all. I wish I did so that I could get a billion dollars for a website that doesn’t particularly own anything.

Is this some attempt at poisoning AI?

ELI5 huggingface?

hosts all the ai models and is the primary resource for downloading them for pretty much all kinds, like depthmaps, masking too, also llms, inage generators, etc.

ngl the first image on their website is pretty much all the explanation you need

I am a LLM, what is this?

Its a big box of toys but replace the toys with downloadable AI models and the box is a website

Wow that was an actual ELI5, thanks!

The core llama.cpp maintainers also work at HF and will now work for Nvidia I guess. Llama.cpp is a pretty significant part of the local LLM stack, especially since other tools like Ollama and LMStudio are just GUIs built on top.

Local LLMs have gotten to the point where they are a serious threat to Anthropic and OpenAI, and Nvidia has a lot of skin in the game. If Nvidia wanted to do some serious damage to local LLMs, they are now in a position to do so.

I’m also imagining they may try to squeeze out support for other GPU vendors. I’m using an AMD 7900 XTX to run Qwen 3.8 27B that I downloaded from HF to run on llama.cpp, which currently works like a dream. The 7900 XTX is the only sanely priced 24GB GPU left in 2026 (under $1k vs. $2k, $3k, $4k for Nvidia 24-32GB cards). Combined with OpenCode or Pi, a setup like this basically eliminates the need to use Anthropic or OpenAI products in the same way Jellyfin eliminates the need to use streaming services.

I’m sure Nvidia and their buddies don’t like one thing I’ve said in this comment and may very well be plotting to put a stop to it, so the community may need to step up our game and get our eggs out of the big tech basket.

what if the LLAMA.CPP devs working at Nvidia improves CUDA support and keeps other vendor support.

It would be great but they seem to favour server computing as that has the greatest margins. I have a feeling being the biggest company on the planet at $5tn is not enough.

Well the good news is they can’t take away from you what you already have. It being an open source project, I’m assuming if they do anything to deliberately gut AMD performance, it’ll get forked.

Also

The 7900 XTX is the only sanely priced 24GB GPU left in 2026 (under $1k vs. $2k, $3k, $4k for Nvidia 24-32GB cards).

Not on sale anymore, at least not at any vendor in my country, I searched an aggregate pricing website. Amazon has a few used ones left of some models, but that’s probably a 2 or 3 digit figure across SKUs. Hold on to yours with an iron grip.

What kind of tok/s are you getting with it on Qwen 3.8 27B and how’s the output quality? I may consider getting one if I can find one used or import from abroad.

Agreed, I was referring more to future updates. Obviously we’re good with what is available now.

I can’t speak to pricing and availability outside the U.S., but it looks like the one I got went up $100:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx7900xtx-24g-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-24gb-graphics-card-triple-fans/p/N82E16814930084. 

I traded in my 3070 and my final price was in the 700s. Last I looked, used ones were going for $800 on eBay vs. $1200 for a used 3090.

I run 3.8 27B at q4 with q4 context up to 200k. Decode is generally in the 30s and pp starts in the 700s and drops to the 400s as context approaches 200k. I use mostly Sonnet 5 at work and I would rate this setup with the OpenCode desktop app as pretty comparable overall for coding at least. Let’s just say I have no reason to use any cloud models, not that I would do that voluntarily outside of being compelled to at work.

I got mine used, around 600 imperial credits. Look for ads that provide proof of working and benchmarks (like FurMark)

I get around 40 token/s and it frequently has become reliable enough to drop sonnet for me. So take that as you will

Intel B50 and B60 pros are at microcenter right now perfect for this.

Oh no! -forks code- anyway…

do we have experts to work on it full time, paid?

The core llama.cpp maintainers also work at HF and will now work for Nvidia I guess. Llama.cpp is a pretty significant part of the local LLM stack, especially since other tools like Ollama and LMStudio are just GUIs built on top.

I guess that explains why features like quantized KV caches are lagging behind. Maintainers are purposely dragging their feet.

the community may need to step up our game and get our eggs out of the big tech basket.

The community has chosen to not fight at all, which is worse. Anti-AI sentiment is at an all-time high.

Publicly. Privately, these hypocrites still whisper in ChatGPT’s ear when they get lazy enough. Or use some feature in Photoshop or some other software that they didn’t even understand was AI-driven.

guess that explains why features like quantized KV caches are lagging behind

Yeah, I was using the TheTom fork for a while and not sure why TQ KV cache hasn’t merged yet.

Anti-AI sentiment is at an all-time high

I suppose the tech bros have understandably soured a lot of people on LLMs with all of the negative societal costs LLMs are created due to their greedy and irresponsible bejavior. On the other hand, the concepts of the perceptron and artificial neural networks from the 40s and 50s are finally coming to fruition and we have these things now that are legitimately artificially intelligent that we can run on our gaming PCs. They are overhyped and used in ways they make no sense, but they’re also useful as long as their limitations are kept in mind. From a technology perspective, they’re cool as hell.

It was only a matter of time

Please tell me this is a rumor

It’s basically a done deal

Fuck

Aye

Fuck

Ok, how come these public utility databases are owned to be sold like that eg gitgub, twitter without any regulator pushback? Oh yea…

The Spark isn’t a bad computer, and they haven’t completely gotten rid of local GPUs, so Nvidia does somewhat care about local llms, but power corrupts and this is just more of it.

let the fuckening begin!

Anybody got a good list of models we should download right now before they start disappearing?

They wont disappear. hugging face is two things. its a model repo and a compute provider. hugging face has paid plans to run models on their systems. nvidia will use this to run on their backend. this is how they plan to make money from hugging face. its in their best interest to keep the repo stuff as is.

I would be less concerned about it being the end of uncensored models than I would be Nvidia finding ways to make sure there are no free models hosted there that work well on anything but Nvidia hardware for the foreseeable future.

Pick up as many uncensored models as you can store ASAP. Those will absolutely be the first to go.

Do you have a list?

gets a face hugger