Hugging Face Emphasizes Open Source to the White House

Hugging Face submitted an official response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)'s Request for Information (RFI) on the AI Action Plan. The core of this response is to reaffirm that open AI systems and open science are essential for the performance, efficiency, security, and broad adoption of AI technology.

The key recommendations are as follows:

• Recognizing the value of open source and open science: The latest AI systems are built on open research and software, including attention mechanisms, transformer architecture, and PyTorch. Therefore, priority should be given to access to public research infrastructure, computing resources, custom models, and trustworthy datasets.
• Prioritizing efficiency and reliability: Support should be provided so that diverse organizations can innovatively adopt AI, through smaller models, techniques that reduce inference compute (such as quantization), and support for mid-scale training.

Hugging Face cited the fact that open models are surpassing or matching the performance of commercial API models, and are also superior in terms of resource efficiency, as grounds for this.