AI agents are transforming how we interact with technology, but how sustainable are they? 🌍
Design choices — like model size and structure — can massively impact energy use and cost. ⚡💰 The key takeaway: smaller, task-specific models can be far more efficient than large, general-purpose ones.
🔑 Open-source models offer greater transparency, allowing us to track energy consumption and make more informed decisions on deployment. 🌱 Open-source = more efficient, eco-friendly, and accountable AI.
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: