What do you want Hugging face's main product/business to be?

We've been working a lot on making it easier for software engineers (instead of just ML engineers) to use the HF platform lately with features like https://twitter.com/julien_c/status/1671159691219709959 or https://twitter.com/julien_c/status/1671914057866133512

Thank you for the answer, how successful at converting casual users into paying members?

One of the biggest problems Tech companies face is sustainable scaling, I hope you can scale at a manner that allows you to stay relevant without teetering at the cliff's edge.

That _is_ really useful! Instead of locking it down like OpenAI. I can't access it from my country.

Do you have long term plans for HF?

feel free to try https://huggingface.co/chat/ fully open-source interface for open-source chat models

I tried it and its super nice. Thanks!

Is the huggingface website/hub API itself open-source? That would be a good place to start for people who are interested but don't know a lot about ML. Plus it's some nice goodwill gesture that helps the "brand" in the circles it's talked about.

it's not open-source as it's how we make money to fund all the rest. The huggingchat interface is fully open-source though: https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui

It’s free to use afaik so that’s good enough tbh. Most people don’t have powerful computers to run the models.

Yes. I pray for the success of open-source AI, particularly groups like HuggingFace and EleutherAI. I'm also terrified of the unfettered use-cases.

What is the thinking on paying to keep the lights on long term?

Seems quite bandwidth heavy so presumably some sort of monetization will be necessary even if following a fairly open model