The following are the learnings from Hugging Face Interview in Oct 2019

  • GPT2 from Open AI is impressive - Packaged in to Demo Application
  • Conversational AI + Open Source package(Transformers)
  • Half a million monthly active users
  • Hard to good Deep Conversational AI
  • Self starter - Was working in 2008 on ML and then moved on to do some software jobs
  • I was curious to see what the number of downloads for various pre-trained models were. So, wrote a small Python program to get the downloads
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import torch
import pandas as pd
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url                = "https://huggingface.co/models"
response           = requests.get(url)
html_soup          = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
models             = html_soup.find(class_ = 'models-list')
model_names=[]
for a in models.find_all('li'):
    model_names.append(a.a['href'])

model_names = [m[1:] for m in model_names] download_counts = [] for a in models.find_all('li'): count = a.find(class_='tooltip').text.strip().split("downloads")[0].strip() download_counts.append(count) model_stats = pd.DataFrame({'model':model_names,'downloads_l30days':download_counts}) model_stats.head(20)

Here are the top 25 models as of [2020-07-06 Mon]

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number                                          model downloads_l30days
0                             distilbert-base-uncased        44,291,279
1                                   bert-base-uncased        43,808,273
2                                     bert-base-cased           830,551
3                                                gpt2           657,636
4                                        roberta-base           619,027
5                                    xlnet-base-cased           474,964
6                        bert-base-multilingual-cased           433,170
7                                       roberta-large           355,542
8          xlm-roberta-large-finetuned-conll03-german           337,872
9                                   xlm-roberta-large           280,967
10                                     albert-base-v2           222,233
11                                         openai-gpt           198,678
12                                  bert-base-chinese           196,817
13                                 bert-large-uncased           158,196
14                                         gpt2-large           155,298
15    cl-tohoku/bert-base-japanese-whole-word-masking           151,115
16                     bert-base-multilingual-uncased           145,300
17                                            gpt2-xl           134,733
18                                 distilroberta-base           126,489
19                 distilbert-base-multilingual-cased           125,623
20                                         distilgpt2           123,623
21                                            t5-base           121,663
22                                           t5-small           102,185
23  deepset/bert-large-uncased-whole-word-masking-...            91,045
24              mrm8488/bert-tiny-5-finetuned-squadv2            85,570
  • Amazed to see that there were 44 million downloads of distilbert and bert models. What am I doing ? Why am I not trying out something that seems to have revolutionized NLP ? 1.5 Million Downloads in one day
  • Look at all the kind of models that are being used
    • Distilbert
    • BERT
    • GPT2
    • ROBERTA
    • XLNET
    • Different language specific models based on BERT
  • AI and Conversational AI are going to be transformative
  • 2005 - Did his engineering in Paris
  • Most of the research professors were interested in theoretical stuff
  • 2016 was the year - Use of Deep learning for applications in conversational AI
  • Founders for a couple of companies
  • 1600 repositories in github
  • Raised 5 Million for NLP work - They are not making any money yet
  • 10-15 member startup are doing amazing work
  • Large Transformers are important in NLP
  • Took a week off and write pytorch version of models
  • 20,000 models every day a year back
  • Super easy to download models and work on the various models
  • It makes using pre-trained models democratic
  • Conversational AI - Entered in to a competition - NuerIPS - Conversational AI
    • Huggingface beat everyone
  • Generative capacity
  • Talk to Transformer project - Huggingface team loved it
  • GPT and BERT are the most popular downloads
  • XLNet(Google) and Roberta(Facebook) are also popular on Huggingface
  • DistilBert cuts down 50% of weights from BERT and gives a similar performance
  • Swift repository - Can ship the models to edge devices
  • Apple uses Hugging face transformers on iPhone
  • Ported GPT2 to iPhone but needs a large memory on iPhone
  • Personal Dataset to train the Conversational AI
  • Conditional text generation
    • Code generation
  • DistilBert - 2 months to build and develop
  • Recommended courses
    • Stanford Class - Put a small study group and work through the videos - Newer version of course is fantastic
    • Fast AI for NLP
    • Learn by doing - Make an open source contribution