I figured something out today about how Model Hub makes money with @OpenGradient .
I used to think Model Hub was just a place to store models, kinda like GitHub but for AI models.
Then I realized that’s not the case.
Model Hub works like this: anyone can upload a model, and when other developers call that model, they have to pay a fee for inference, of which a portion goes to the model uploader.
What this means is: if you train a useful AI model and upload it to Model Hub, you earn $OPG every time someone uses it.
This logic is pretty interesting.
Right now, Hugging Face has hundreds of thousands of open-source models, most of which are free, and the trainers don’t earn anything.
The logic of Model Hub is: if you contribute a model, you should benefit from its usage.
This is a real economic incentive for AI researchers—to place models here instead of just putting them on GitHub for free.
I’m thinking: if Model Hub can really attract high-quality professional models, then the developer experience calling these models will improve, leading to more $OPG consumption.
This is the starting point of a positive feedback loop—high model quality → developers love to use them → high inference consumption → model uploaders earn more → more high-quality models come in.
But this loop hasn’t kicked off yet. Out of the 2000+ models on the testnet, I don’t know how many are high-quality professional models.
The core question I have about Model Hub is whether the loop with $OPG can get going.
Have you ever trained an AI model? If you could earn from others using it, would you upload it to Model Hub?
#OPG
I used to think Model Hub was just a place to store models, kinda like GitHub but for AI models.
Then I realized that’s not the case.
Model Hub works like this: anyone can upload a model, and when other developers call that model, they have to pay a fee for inference, of which a portion goes to the model uploader.
What this means is: if you train a useful AI model and upload it to Model Hub, you earn $OPG every time someone uses it.
This logic is pretty interesting.
Right now, Hugging Face has hundreds of thousands of open-source models, most of which are free, and the trainers don’t earn anything.
The logic of Model Hub is: if you contribute a model, you should benefit from its usage.
This is a real economic incentive for AI researchers—to place models here instead of just putting them on GitHub for free.
I’m thinking: if Model Hub can really attract high-quality professional models, then the developer experience calling these models will improve, leading to more $OPG consumption.
This is the starting point of a positive feedback loop—high model quality → developers love to use them → high inference consumption → model uploaders earn more → more high-quality models come in.
But this loop hasn’t kicked off yet. Out of the 2000+ models on the testnet, I don’t know how many are high-quality professional models.
The core question I have about Model Hub is whether the loop with $OPG can get going.
Have you ever trained an AI model? If you could earn from others using it, would you upload it to Model Hub?
#OPG