Hugging Face is very well-known for its AI models—almost every open-source model you can imagine is hosted or at least made available for download there. You might also know it includes a large number of datasets, many of which come from the training data used by these models.
But Hugging Face is much more than that. I’m certainly not able to fully show how powerful this platform is, but here are a few features I personally find very powerful and use frequently. Hopefully, they might help you too.
Here they are:
#1 Gradio and Spaces
If you haven’t heard of Gradio, it’s time to check it out.
What is Gradio?
Gradio is an open-source Python library that helps developers create simple web interfaces for machine learning models, APIs, and data science workflows with minimal code. It simplifies the process of building interactive demos and applications for different input types, including text, images, audio, and video.
With Gradio, you can build a proof of concept (POC) for any idea in a very short time, simply because it combines the backend and the frontend in one piece of code. In its shortest form, everything can be in one file (though as the application grows, you should consider making it more modular, but you get the idea).
In Hugginface you can create and run a Gradio application (so called Space) with just a few clicks (or commands), so the application is not just available as code, but as a living piece of software that you can use privately (private space) or publicly. The public space can not only be shared via URL, but you can even embed it in any application.
Below are a few examples of so-called Spaces built with Gradio on Hugging Face, all available for free:
- Kokoro Text-to-Speech (WebGPU): High-quality speech synthesis powered by Kokoro TTS.
- Hibiki Simple: High-fidelity speech-to-speech translation.
- Open Deep-Research: OpenAI’s Deep Research, but open.
- Granite Vision 3.1 2B: Chat with images and text.
- TinySwallow-1.5B-Instruct-WebGPU: A compact Japanese LLM running locally in the browser.
- Lumina Image 2.0: Generate images from text prompts.
- lm-similarity: Space for language model similarity on Open LLM Leaderboard data.
- Chat With Janus-Pro-7B: Unified multimodal understanding and generation model.
- FLUX.1 [dev]: Generate images from text prompts.
- Hunyuan3D-2.0: Text-to-3D and image-to-3D generation.
- TRELLIS: Scalable and flexible 3D generation from images.
- Anychat: Chat system for conversational AI.
- Kolors Virtual Try-On: Try on garments on virtual models.
Hugging Face has thousands of these Spaces. They’re not just free to use—they’re also open source.
Finding a Space with AI
Because the number of Spaces has grown so much, finding interesting ones can be challenging. So Hugging Face added a helpful AI search to find a Space using natural language.
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