I love huggingface and they've done a lot for the industry
...But...
I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.
I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.
That's the cost side as far as I understand it.
On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.
How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.
...But...
I'm so confused by the economics, and not in a general way.
I'm a mobile developer by trade, and AFAICT from dipping my toe in the water of servers, file downloads are on the order of $0.01/GB, and cheapest you'll get publicly is maybe $0.04/GB. But they never ever charge and regularly have people downloading tens of gigabytes.
That's the cost side as far as I understand it.
On the revenue side...afaict all they have is inference? And they don't seem to be popular for an inference solution? I don't hear much about it and they don't seem to care too much.
How do their economics even begin to pencil out? It bothers me, I've lived through enough companies to know this doesn't matter in the short term. But this is novel, to me, in that there's no plan, no market being addressed. With other money losers, you knew what they were trying to do and they were doing it.