Hugging Face Unveils Inference-as-a-Service Powered by NVIDIA NIM at SIGGRAPH 2024

Open Source platform Hugging Face is offering developers Inference-as-a-Service that will be powered by NVIDIA's NIM. The new service provides 5x better token efficiency for AI models and allows immediate access to NIM microservices running on NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

Open Source platform Hugging Face is now offering developers Inference-as-a-Service that will be powered by NVIDIA’s NIM. The new service provides 5x better token efficiency for AI models and allows immediate access to NIM microservices running on NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

The new inference-as-a-service was announced at the ongoing SIGGRAPH 2024, a premier conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques in Denver, Colorado. The new service will let developers deploy powerful LLMs like Llama 2, Mistral AI models and many more with optimisation from NVIDIA NIM microservices. Hugging Face Enterprise Hub users can access serverless inference for increased flexibility and minimal infrastructure overhead with NVIDIA NIM.

When accessed as a NIM, large models like the 70-billion-parameter version of Llama 3 will deliver up to 5x higher throughput when compared with off-the-shelf deployment on NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU-powered systems.

The new inference service also supports Train on DGX Cloud, an AI training service that is already available on Hugging Face.

Enter NVIDIA NIM

NVIDIA NIM is a set of AI microservices, including NVIDIA AI foundation models and open-source community models, that has been optimised for inference with standard APIs. It improves token processing efficiency and enhances the NVIDIA DGX Cloud infrastructure, accelerating AI applications. This setup provides faster, more robust results.

The NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform is tailored for generative AI, offering developers reliable, accelerated computing infrastructure for faster production readiness. It supports AI development from prototyping to production without requiring long-term commitments.

Hugging Face to the Fore

The new announcement banks on an existing partnership between both tech companies and is only going to foster the developer community further. Interesting recent announcements from Hugging Face include its profitability with a 220-member team and the release of SmolLM, a series of small language models.