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Hacker News
Are you really hosting the model? Are you making its bed, cooking its food and cleaning up for it?
by seydor
Same difference between S3 bucket and Google Photos (web). Both "host" images but one provides an experience on top of the underlying assets.
by bitpush
I wouldn’t say they’re interchangeable. You would have both apply to a model but they have different meanings.
You’d host the model so it’s available to be used.
You’d request it to infer when you wanted to use the model for its purpose.
Inference sounds cooler and more mystical. Any old company can host something, "running inference" requires 10x rock star engineers and a CEO that acts like a badass who wears a leather jacket and has Thoughts about demographics.
by mrhottakes
Like so many things in computing, we like to make up words and also reuse old ones for completely different things.
I'd say "hosting" means making something available to you in the cloud. Model makers don't offer that.
They sell "inference," which is a compute task with real hardware costs for them. The task runs against their model, which is not hosted for you.
by dtagames
Inference is what you do with the model. It's not an executable, so you don't run a model directly, instead a separate program runs and that program reads from the model. Also, hosting can be used to mean running inference on a model, but it could also be used to mean just storing the files and possibly making them available for download, so it's a bit more vague.
by dlcarrier
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- Hacker News
- Are you really hosting the model? Are you making its bed, cooking its food and cleaning up for it?by seydor
- Same difference between S3 bucket and Google Photos (web). Both "host" images but one provides an experience on top of the underlying assets.by bitpush
- I wouldn’t say they’re interchangeable. You would have both apply to a model but they have different meanings.
You’d host the model so it’s available to be used.
You’d request it to infer when you wanted to use the model for its purpose.
- Inference sounds cooler and more mystical. Any old company can host something, "running inference" requires 10x rock star engineers and a CEO that acts like a badass who wears a leather jacket and has Thoughts about demographics.by mrhottakes
- Like so many things in computing, we like to make up words and also reuse old ones for completely different things.
I'd say "hosting" means making something available to you in the cloud. Model makers don't offer that.
They sell "inference," which is a compute task with real hardware costs for them. The task runs against their model, which is not hosted for you.
by dtagames - Inference is what you do with the model. It's not an executable, so you don't run a model directly, instead a separate program runs and that program reads from the model. Also, hosting can be used to mean running inference on a model, but it could also be used to mean just storing the files and possibly making them available for download, so it's a bit more vague.by dlcarrier