Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI

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Can we toss in the work unsloth does too as an unsung hero?

They provide excellent documentation and they’re often very quick to get high quality quants up in major formats. They’re a very trustworthy brand.

It's insane how much traffic HF must be pushing out of the door. I routinely download models that are hundreds of gigabytes in size from them. A fantastic service to the sovererign AI community.

> We still need good value hardware to run Kimi/GLM in-house

If you stream weights in from SSD storage and freely use swap to extend your KV cache it will be really slow (multiple seconds per token!) but run on basically anything. And that's still really good for stuff that can be computed overnight, perhaps even by batching many requests simultaneously. It gets progressively better as you add more compute, of course.

Why doesn't HF support BitTorrent? I know about hf-torrent and hf_transfer, but those aren't nearly as accessible as a link in the web UI.

I still don't know why they are not running on torrent. Its the perfect use case.

FT had a solid piece a few weeks back: "Why AI start-up Hugging Face turned down a $500mn Nvidia deal"

https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/9b4eca...

Their business model is essentially the same as GitHub. Host lots of stuff for free and build a community around it, sell the upscaled/private version to businesses. They are already profitable.

They have paid hosting - https://huggingface.co/enterprise and paid accounts. Also consulting services. Seems like a pretty good foundation to me.

>Will they ever "sell out"?

Oh no, never. Don't worry, the usual investors are very well known for fighting for user autonomy (AMD, Nvidia, Intel,IBM, Qualcomm)

They are all very pro consumers and all backers are certainly here for your enjoyment only

I once tried hugging face because I wanted I worked through some tutorial. They wanted my credit card details during the registration as far as I remember. After a month they invoiced me some amount of money and I had no idea what it was. To be honest, I don't understand what exactly they do and what services I was paying for, but I cancelled my account and never touched it again. For me that was a totally intransparent process.

Truly amazing that they've managed to build an open and profitable platform without shady practices

Llama.cpp is an open source project that anyone can fork as needed, so any "control" over it really only extends to facilitating development of certain features.

Looks like Gargamel of Smurfs fame to me.

I mean they already supported the project quite a bit. @ngxson and maybe others? from Huggingface are big contributors to llama.cpp.

8GB is not enough to do complex reasoning, but you could do very small simple things. Models like Whisper, SmolVLM, Quen2.5-0.5B, Phi-3-mini, Granite-4.0-micro, Mistral-7B, Gemma3, Llama-3.2 all work on very little memory. Tiny models can do a lot if you tune/train them. They also need to be used differently: system prompt preloaded with information, few-shot examples, reasoning guidance, single-task purpose, strict output guidelines. See https://github.com/acon96/home-llm for an example. For each small model, check if Unsloth has a tuned version of it; it reduces your memory footprint and makes inference faster.

For your Mac, you can use Ollama, or MLX (Mac ARM specific, requires different engine and different model disk format, but is faster). Ramalama may help fix bugs or ease the process w/MLX. Use either Docker Desktop or Colima for the VM + Docker.

For today's coding & reasoning models, you need a minimum of 32GB VRAM combined (graphics + system), the more in GPU the better. Copying memory between CPU and GPU is too slow so the model needs to "live" in GPU space. If it can't fit all in GPU space, your CPU has to work hard, and you get a space heater. That Mac M1 will do 5-10 tokens/s with 8GB (and CPU on full blast), or 50 token/s with 32GB RAM (CPU idling). And now you know why there's a RAM shortage.

There’s no way around needing a powerful-enough system to run the model. So you either choose a model that can fit on what you have —i.e. via a small model, or a quantised slightly larger model— or you access more powerful hardware, either by buying it or renting it. (IME you don’t need Docker. For an easy start just install LM Studio and have a play.)

I picked up a second-hand 64GB M1 Max MacBook Pro a while back for not too much money for such experimentation. It’s sufficiently fast at running any LLM models that it can fit in memory, but the gap between those models and Claude is considerable. However, this might be a path for you? It can also run all manner of diffusion models, but there the performance suffers (vs. an older discrete GPU) and you’re waiting sometimes many minutes for an edit or an image.

The general rule of thumb is that you should feel free to quantize even as low as 2 bits average if this helps you run a model with more active parameters. Quantized models are not perfect at all, but they're preferable to the models with fewer, bigger parameters. With 8GB usable, you could run models with up to 32B active at heavy quantization.

I think a better bet is to ask on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/

Everytime I ask the same thing here, people point me there.

With only 8 GB of memory, you're going to be running a really small quant, and it's going to be slow and lower quality. But yes, it should be doable. In the worst case, find a tiny gguf and run it on CPU with llamafile.

This is the easiest set up on a Mac. You need at least 16gb on a MacBook:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396

Maybe check out Docker Model Runner -- it's built on llama.cpp (in a good way -- not like Ollama) and handles I think most of what you're looking for?

https://www.docker.com/blog/run-llms-locally/

As far as how to find good models to run locally, I found this site recently, and I liked the data it provides:

https://localclaw.io/

I tried to run some models on my M1 Max (32 GB) Mac Studio and it was a pretty miserable experience. Slow performance and awful results.

Mistral have small variants (3B, 8B, 14B, etc.), as do others like IBM Granite and Qwen. Then there are finetunes based on these models, depending on your workflow/requirements.

I am actually doing now a good part of dev with Qwen3-Coder-Next on an M1 64GB with Qwen Code CLI (a fork of Gemini CLI). I very much like

  a) to have an idea how much tokens I use and 
  b) be independent of VC financed token machines and 
  c) I can use it on a plane/train

I don't do full vibe coding with a dozen agents though. I read all the code it produces and guide it where necessary.

Last not least, at some point the VC funded party will be over and when this happens one better knows how to be highly efficient in AI token use.

I'm not entirely clear what your goals are but roughly, just figure out an application that holds your interest and build a model for it from scratch. Probably don't start with an LLM though. Same as for anything else really. If you're interest in computer graphics then decide on a small scale project and go build it from scratch. Etc.

Maybe look into model finetuning/distilation. Unsloth [1] has great guides and provides everything you need to get started on Google Colab for free. [1] https://unsloth.ai/

I have used both (albeit 2 years ago, and things change really fast). At the time, Candle didn't have 2d conv backprop with strides properly implemented. And getting Burn running libtch backend was just a lot simpler.

I did use candle for wasm based inference for teaching purposes - that was reasonably painless and pretty nice.

>I've been one of the strongest supporters of local AI, dedicating thousands of hours towards building a framework to enable it.

Sounds like you're very serious about supporting local AI. I have a query for you (and anyone else who feels like donating) about whether you'd be willing to donate some memory/bandwidth resources p2p to hosting an offline model:

We have a local model we would like to distribute but don't have a good CDN.

As a user/supporter question, would you be willing to donate some spare memory/bandwidth in a simple dedicated browser tab you keep open on your desktop that plays silent audio (to not be put in the background and deloaded) and then allocates 100mb -1 gb of RAM and acts as a webrtc peer, serving checksumed models?[1] (Then our server only has to check that you still have it from time to time, by sending you some salt and a part of the file to hash and your tab proves it still has it by doing so). This doesn't require any trust, and the receiving user will also hash it and report if there's a mismatch.

Our server federates the p2p connections, so when someone downloads they do so from a trusted peer (one who has contributed and passed the audits) like you. We considered building a binary for people to run but we consider that people couldn't trust our binaries, or would target our build process somehow, we are paranoid about trust, whereas a web model is inherently untrusted and safer. Why do all this?

The purpose of this would be to host an offline model: we successfully ported a 1 GB model from C++ and Python to WASM and WebGPU (you can see Claude doing so here, we livestreamed some of it[2]), but the model weights at 1 GB are too much for us to host.

Please let us know whether this is something you would contribute a background tab to hosting on your desktop. It wouldn't impact you much and you could set how much memory to dedicate to it, but you would have the good feeling of knowing that you're helping people run a trusted offline model if they want - from their very own browser, no download required. The model we ported is fast enough for anyone to run on their own machines. Let me know if this is something you'd be willing to keep a tab open for.

[1] filesharing over webrtc works like this: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ you can try it in 2 browser tabs.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbAkySCXyp0and and some other videos

I think that's because there's less local AI usage now since there's all kinds of image models by the big labs, so there's really no rush of people self hosting stable diffusion etc anymore

the space moved from Consumer to Enterprise pretty fast due to models getting bigger

part of what discussion? anyone in the AI space knows and uses HF, but the public doesn't give a care and why should they? It's just an advanced site were nerds download AI stuff. HF is super valuable with their transformers library, their code, tutorials, smol-models, etc, but how does it translate to investor dollars?

It isn't necessary to be part of the discussion if you are truly adding value (which HF continues to do). It's nice to see a company doing what it does best without constantly driving the hype train.

> Isn't HF banned in China?

I think, for some definition of “banned”, that’s the case. It doesn’t stop the Chinese labs from having organization accounts on HF and distributing models there. ModelScope is apparently the HF-equivalent for reaching Chinese users.

I think in the West we think everything is blocked. But for example, if you book an eSIM, when you visit you already get direct access to Western services because they route it to some other server. Hong Kong is totally different: they basically use WhatsApp and Google Maps, and everything worked when I was there.

HF is indeed banned in China. The Chinese equivalent of HF is ModelScope[1].

[1]: https://modelscope.cn/

And clearly I say all of this in my name and not my employers name

And I said all of that despite us continuing to use their platform and libraries extensively… We just don’t have a choice due to their dominance of open source ML

I believe ggml.ai was funded by angel investors, not VC.