HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?
It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.
I'd honestly prefer that. I'm usually on 5g if not 4g and pulling models is an absolute nightmare when I basically have to use HF and even with a token getting throttled. Although I have a pretty unique use case. Pulling wads of 5gb tensor files over cellular is painful.
I am on the same boat, I live in a small Himalayan village. I have 2x5G based devices and one Wireless bridge (Ubiquiti LiteBeam M5) for a local broadband. Generally I get 50 Mbps, sometimes up to 100 Mbps
i'm traveling in an RV and can always (80% of the time) get up to 3MBps, max to 300. But with cellular it's mega spotty so pulling 3-10 5GB files then losing your connection for a few seconds/minutes completely kills that files download. I've tried about 10 different keep-alive-ing type hf downloader clients and with my 64gb ram I'm usually downloading 25-32GB models and I don't even try unless I'm in sitting in a city next to a library anymore.
It's less of a pain now that I'm not in my LLM newbie phase of trying to test out 30 different models and stick with Qwen, but I couldn't even try to download qwen 3.8 for a week or two until I got back to the city.
Starlink is the obvious option and I have it on my roof but I do everything I can to not pay that $170 a month vs my $170/quarter 5g service.
I don't know anyone who "finds" models on HF. The announcements always come through Reddit, HN, Xitter, and various Discords. HF is just a place where some people bought a domain name, spun up a file server, and struck it rich. If they went away tomorrow, they'd be replaced the next day.
I am quite skeptical that an acquisition by Nvidia will make people move somewhere else ... The network effect remains central, if you are researcher/lab/company and you want to promote your model/dataset you go to the popular platform where most of the community is. The same way most of the public repo are still being published on GitHub despite people being pissed of by Microsoft acquisition. (I you add on top of that the cost changing your workflow, not using HF library, ... it make the transition even more difficult)
If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?
It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.