The training compute shared on Hugging Face is worth nearly $1 billion
Thomas Wolf estimates that the value of training compute shared on the Hugging Face Hub by about 30-plus labs, including Meta, NVIDIA, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Mistral, is approaching $1 billion, and it can be downloaded for free; at the end of 2023, that figure was still less than $40 million. He calls this number a lower bound: about half comes from official compute data, the rest is reasonable inference, and it does not yet include the roughly 900,000 community fine-tuned models.
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Fun and crazy napkin math: Meta, NVIDIA, Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Mistral and ~30 other labs have shared close to $1B worth of training compute on the Hugging Face Hub
Free to download
End of 2023 it was under $40M
Wikipedia was written in volunteer hours. This AI age commons is written in GPU-hours and data
(it's a floor btw: about half comes from official compute numbers rest is educated guess and it still miss the ~900k community fine-tunes)
Space with data to explore: https://t.co/hy28to6BiR