[HN Gopher] Hugging Face Acquires Gradio ___________________________________________________________________ Hugging Face Acquires Gradio Author : aliabd Score : 54 points Date : 2021-12-16 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (gradio.app) (TXT) w3m dump (gradio.app) | minimaxir wrote: | It's interesting that for Hugging Face Spaces that Gradio beat | out the more-established/more VC-backed Streamlit, despite many | functional and API similarities (I haven't used both enough to | explicitly compare/contrast). | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Is it only me that transposes Hugging Face to Face Hugger? [1] | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc... | dvirsky wrote: | Me too, I had to see the emoji for it to click that it's not an | Alien reference. | hallway_monitor wrote: | This is 100% what I think of. I have no idea what this company | does but the name is terrible and terrible names kill good | companies. | nerdponx wrote: | As I understand, it's a reference to the Hugging Face emoji, | which is supposed to be a kind of emblem for the complexity | and promise of natural language processing. Or something like | that, anyway. | hwers wrote: | Both seem like such weird products to me. As soon as you build | something that people would find useful the thing becomes | unusable with a 10 day queue since apps are only granted CPU | resources. The only reason I see for the flood of people making | thing on there is the heavy amount somewhat annoying amount of | attention they grab for on twitter etc. Just a weird thing in my | eyes. | abidlabs wrote: | If I (as a Gradio founder) can offer a different perspective: | most apps on Hugging Face Spaces are not designed for | production-level traffic. Instead, it might be a researcher who | wants to share a demo of their model for reproducibility | purposes, a student who's built a class project, or a hobbyist | interested in building out a portfolio. For most of these | projects, writing a simple gradio application and hosting on | Spaces is the easiest way to share their machine learning | model. | GrayShade wrote: | Mostly unrelated, but that sketch recognition demo on the landing | page is worse [1] than the Xerox photocopier firmware from a | while back [2]. | | EDIT: to be fair, it does work slightly better on mobile. | | [1]: https://imgur.com/a/pZMNiIU. | | [2]: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox- | workcentres... | abidlabs wrote: | Asking for clarification so that we can improve it -- is it | that the UI is not usable, or is that the model predicts things | inaccurately? If it's the latter, it might say more about the | model (a convolutional network with high accuracy on the MNIST | dataset) than Gradio | BasilPH wrote: | The UI is fine. The model seems to struggle with me drawing 6 | on desktop. | | Reading "Sketch Recognition" I was expecting something akin | to Google draw which recognises objects like cars and trees. | The digit classifier is of course fine, but I felt a bit | disappointed when I realised it "only" does numbers. I also | think it's the least impressive of the demos you have. | PeterisP wrote: | Probably not even the model, but the preprocessing - MNIST- | trained models expect all the digits to have the same | preprocessing that MNIST had (because that's all they saw), | so if you apply a MNIST-optimized model directly to user- | generated input without e.g. resizing and re-centering the | images (or, alternatively, a "robustized" model trained with | various data augmentations), then you're going to have | horrible results. | BasilPH wrote: | Came here to say the same. When I draw a 6 on desktop, it | doesn't even show up in the list of candidates. | aliabd wrote: | We posted gradio as a Show HN mid 2020 [1] :) Got a lot of good | feedback and have been slowly growing ever since! | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901834 | [deleted] | abidlabs wrote: | Particularly, one of the most useful feedback we heard early on | was adding support for rendering the GUI in jupyter/colab | notebooks. Extremely common use case (that also allowed us to | distinguish ourselves from some competitors) | nilsbunger wrote: | I got to work with the Gradio founders as an early investor. They | are a fantastic ML team, and they really leaned into doing lots | of customer outreach to find their market. Congrats to Abu, | Ali^2, Dawood, and the team; well-deserved and excited for the | next phase of your journey. | abidlabs wrote: | Very grateful to you and Pear for the all the lessons on | talking to customers. Will remember for a long time! | aliabd wrote: | Thank you Nils! We were very fortunate to work with you and all | of the awesome people at Pear! | Reubend wrote: | Forgive me for the somewhat disparaging comment, but Gradio's | product seems very basic to be. Can anyone shed some light on why | HF felt the need to acquire them, rather than to just build their | own version? Is there really so much complexity there that it was | quicker to just acquire? | oh_sigh wrote: | Consider that they could have been bought for $1. | roseway4 wrote: | Possibly an acquihire? Pure conjecture: They may have had | difficulty competing with Streamlit[0] and decided to throw in | the towel. | | [0] https://streamlit.io/ | andreyk wrote: | Gradio is already integrated to some extent to HF's platform, | and nothing is as trivial to build as it seems. So it just made | sense to buy an existing refined solution and to hit the ground | running rather than build from scratch. | nerdponx wrote: | Maybe it's an "acqui-hire". | laGrenouille wrote: | I agree about the product; perhaps they were acquired for the | people rather than the actual IP. Would make sense from that | perspective for HF, which has leaned strongly in the text | direction, if they want to expand in the AI space. | minimaxir wrote: | HF has expanded beyond text into image/video; gradio can do | multimedia I/O. | FL33TW00D wrote: | This was a given if you follow this space closely - surprised it | took this long. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-16 23:00 UTC)