Ever notice how some AI assistants feel like tools while others feel like companions? Turns out, it's not always about fancy tech upgrades, because sometimes it's just clever design.
Our latest blog post at Hugging Face dives into how minimal design choices can completely transform how users experience AI. We've seen our community turn the same base models into everything from swimming coaches to interview prep specialists with surprisingly small tweaks.
The most fascinating part? When we tested identical models with different "personalities" in our Inference Playground, the results were mind-blowing.
Want to experiment yourself? Our Inference Playground lets anyone (yes, even non-coders!) test these differences in real-time. You can:
- Compare multiple models side-by-side - Customize system prompts - Adjust parameters like temperature - Test multi-turn conversations
It's fascinating how a few lines of instruction text can transform the same AI from strictly professional to seemingly caring and personal, without changing a single line of code in the model itself.
๐ข๐พ Introducing the Common Crawl Creative Commons Corpus (C5)!
C5 is a large-scale effort to heavily filter web-crawled data, as collected by the non-profit Common Crawl, to only documents that are Creative Commons-licensed such as cc-by-4.0 or public domain cc0. At this stage 150 billion tokens have been collected.
</> To build C5, HTML pages are scrutinized and all links (if any) to CC licenses are collected, both in regular hyperlinks as well as in metadata. Additional data fields are included such as "was the license found in the head?" or "if multiple licenses were found, do they contradict each other?", which makes further filtering a breeze.
๐ In this first version of C5, 8 languages are included (Afrikaans, German, English, French, Frysian, Italian, Dutch and Spanish). The language set was limited for two reasons: computational and storage limitations, and a collaboration with GPT-NL, which requested CC data for these languages to train a Dutch-focused, copyright-conscious LLM. In total, this V1 release contains almost 150 thousand documents and 150 billion tokens. This data was not filtered on quality nor deduplicated so that you can decide for yourself how much data to keep. To give some quality indication, a dataset field is present to describe whether a document is included in the FineWeb(-2) datasets, which are of high quality.
๐ More work needs to be done! Only 7 out of 100+ Common Crawl crawls have been processed so far. That's encouraging because it means there is a lot more Creative Commons data to be collected! But to get there I need help in terms of compute. The current processing was already heavily sponsored by the Flemish Supercomputer but more is needed. If you have the compute available and which to collaborate in an open and transparent manner, please get in touch!
Energy is a massive constraint for AI but do you even know what energy your chatGPT convos are using?
We're trying to change this by releasing ChatUI-energy, the first interface where you see in real-time what energy your AI conversations consume. Great work from @jdelavande powered by spaces & TGI, available for a dozen of open-source models like Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma and more.
Today in Privacy & AI Tooling - introducing a nifty new tool to examine where data goes in open-source apps on ๐ค
HF Spaces have tons (100Ks!) of cool demos leveraging or examining AI systems - and because most of them are OSS we can see exactly how they handle user data ๐๐
That requires actually reading the code though, which isn't always easy or quick! Good news: code LMs have gotten pretty good at automatic review, so we can offload some of the work - here I'm using Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct to generate reports and it works pretty OK ๐
The app works in three stages: 1. Download all code files 2. Use the Code LM to generate a detailed report pointing to code where data is transferred/(AI-)processed (screen 1) 3. Summarize the app's main functionality and data journeys (screen 2) 4. Build a Privacy TLDR with those inputs
It comes with a bunch of pre-reviewed apps/Spaces, great to see how many process data locally or through (private) HF endpoints ๐ค
I read the 456-page AI Index report so you don't have to (kidding). The wild part? While AI gets ridiculously more accessible, the power gap is actually widening:
1๏ธโฃ The democratization of AI capabilities is accelerating rapidly: - The gap between open and closed models is basically closed: difference in benchmarks like MMLU and HumanEval shrunk to just 1.7% in 2024 - The cost to run GPT-3.5-level performance dropped 280x in 2 years - Model size is shrinking while maintaining performance - Phi-3-mini hitting 60%+ MMLU at fraction of parameters of early models like PaLM
2๏ธโฃ But we're seeing concerning divides deepening: - Geographic: US private investment ($109B) dwarfs everyone else - 12x China's $9.3B - Research concentration: US and China dominate highly-cited papers (50 and 34 respectively in 2023), while next closest is only 7 - Gender: Major gaps in AI skill penetration rates - US shows 2.39 vs 1.71 male/female ratio
The tech is getting more accessible but the benefits aren't being distributed evenly. Worth thinking about as these tools become more central to the economy.
AI agents are transforming how we interact with technology, but how sustainable are they? ๐
Design choices โ like model size and structure โ can massively impact energy use and cost. โก๐ฐ The key takeaway: smaller, task-specific models can be far more efficient than large, general-purpose ones.
๐ Open-source models offer greater transparency, allowing us to track energy consumption and make more informed decisions on deployment. ๐ฑ Open-source = more efficient, eco-friendly, and accountable AI.
Huge week for xet-team as Llama 4 is the first major model on Hugging Face uploaded with Xet providing the backing! Every byte downloaded comes through our infrastructure.
Using Xet on Hugging Face is the fastest way to download and iterate on open source models and we've proved it with Llama 4 giving a boost of ~25% across all models.
We expect builders on the Hub to see even more improvements, helping power innovation across the community.
With the models on our infrastructure, we can peer in and see how well our dedupe performs across the Llama 4 family. On average, we're seeing ~25% dedupe, providing huge savings to the community who iterate on these state-of-the-art models. The attached image shows a few selected models and how they perform on Xet.
Thanks to the meta-llama team for launching on Xet!
reacted to giadap's
post with โค๏ธ๐ฅabout 2 months ago
We've all become experts at clicking "I agree" without a second thought. In my latest blog post, I explore why these traditional consent models are increasingly problematic in the age of generative AI.
I found three fundamental challenges: - Scope problem: how can you know what you're agreeing to when AI could use your data in different ways? - Temporality problem: once an AI system learns from your data, good luck trying to make it "unlearn" it. - Autonomy trap: the data you share today could create systems that pigeonhole you tomorrow.
Individual users shouldn't bear all the responsibility, while big tech holds all the cards. We need better approaches to level the playing field, from collective advocacy and stronger technological safeguards to establishing "data fiduciaries" with a legal duty to protect our digital interests.