5 years ago, we launched Gradio as a simple Python library to let researchers at Stanford easily demo computer vision models with a web interface.
Today, Gradio is used by >1 million developers each month to build and share AI web apps. This includes some of the most popular open-source projects of all time, like Automatic1111, Fooocus, Oobabooga’s Text WebUI, Dall-E Mini, and LLaMA-Factory.
How did we get here? How did Gradio keep growing in the very crowded field of open-source Python libraries? I get this question a lot from folks who are building their own open-source libraries. This post distills some of the lessons that I have learned over the past few years:
1. Invest in good primitives, not high-level abstractions 2. Embed virality directly into your library 3. Focus on a (growing) niche 4. Your only roadmap should be rapid iteration 5. Maximize ways users can consume your library's outputs
1. Invest in good primitives, not high-level abstractions
When we first launched Gradio, we offered only one high-level class (gr.Interface), which created a complete web app from a single Python function. We quickly realized that developers wanted to create other kinds of apps (e.g. multi-step workflows, chatbots, streaming applications), but as we started listing out the apps users wanted to build, we realized what we needed to do:
There seems to multiple paid apps shared here that are based on models on hf, but some ppl sell their wrappers as "products" and promote them here. For a long time, hf was the best and only platform to do oss model stuff but with the recent AI website builders anyone can create a product (really crappy ones btw) and try to sell it with no contribution to oss stuff. Please dont do this, or try finetuning the models you use... Sorry for filling yall feed with this bs but yk...