from Hacker News

Hugging Face Acquires Gradio

by aliabd on 12/16/21, 6:14 PM with 37 comments

  • by Reubend on 12/16/21, 6:38 PM

    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?

  • by GrayShade on 12/16/21, 7:47 PM

    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...

  • by aliabd on 12/16/21, 6:18 PM

    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

  • by lowbloodsugar on 12/16/21, 6:48 PM

    Is it only me that transposes Hugging Face to Face Hugger? [1]

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(creature_in_Alien_franc...

  • by nilsbunger on 12/16/21, 7:49 PM

    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.

  • by minimaxir on 12/16/21, 6:28 PM

    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).

  • by rg111 on 12/17/21, 7:06 AM

    I have used Gradio and Streamlit extensively, and I am very disappointed with Gradio.

    The options are limited, the UI is ugly, customisability is near non-existent.

    I dumped using it, and focused entirely on Streamlit.

    I am satisfied. At a previous company, we used Gradio + Strelit to demo apps to clients. We ditched Gradio and switched fully to Streamlit.

    I recommend Streamlit over Gradio any day.

    What Gradio has better than Streamlit is just better marketing.

    The CEO twitted tirelessly about Gradio demos that others built, and these are the most eye-catching parts of AI "research". So those tweets would catch attention and RTs.

    Then they hired one of the most followed person in the AI space- Abdul Khalique. He is @ak<some_number> on Twitter. He, for a long time, tweets new and noticeable arXiv papers, and hence has a considerable following.

    Gradio hired him, and he now posted arXiv papers and their Gradio demos, and tagged Gradio at each tweet. That's how the word got around and with their marketing game, they increased market share.

    Now I see the acquisition.

    I would say that the CEO had this acquisition as his goal for a long time.

    He would post Gradio demos, tag Hugging Face at each possible tweets.

    Gradio is sub-quality product at best, and useless at worst.

  • by FL33TW00D on 12/16/21, 8:19 PM

    This was a given if you follow this space closely - surprised it took this long.

  • by AstroDogCatcher on 12/16/21, 11:34 PM

    I just tried the demo sketch thing on the Gradio site and it wasn't able to correctly interpret a single digit I tried, even after 6 or 7 attempts with different values. Serious question - is this a spoof site? I find it hard to believe character recognition can be that bad, in a marketing demo no less.

  • by hwers on 12/16/21, 9:30 PM

    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.