Tremendous quality of life upgrade on the Hugging Face Hub - we now have auto-complete emojis ๐ค ๐ฅณ ๐ ๐ ๐
Get ready for lots more very serious analysis on a whole range of topics from yours truly now that we have unlocked this full range of expression ๐ ๐ค ๐ฃ ๐
With the release of the EU data transparency template this week, we finally got to see one of the most meaningful artifacts to come out of the AI Act implementation so far (haven't you heard? AI's all about the data! ๐๐)
The impact of the template will depend on how effectively it establishes a minimum meaningful transparency standard for companies that don't otherwise offer any transparency into their handling of e.g. personal data or (anti?-)competitive practices in commercial licensing - we'll see how those play out as new models are released after August 2nd ๐
In the meantime, I wanted to see how the template works for a fully open-source + commercially viable model, so I filled it out for the SmolLM3 - which my colleagues at Hugging Face earlier this month ๐ค ICYMI, it's fully open-source with 3B parameters and performance matching the best similar-size models (I've switched all my local apps from Qwen3 to it, you should too ๐ก)
Verdict: congrats to the European Commission AI Office for making it so straightforward! Fully open and transparent models remain a cornerstone of informed regulation and governance, but the different organizational needs of their developers aren't always properly accounted for in new regulation. In this case, it took me all of two hours to fill out and publish the template (including reading the guidelines) - so kudos for making it feasible for smaller and distributed organizations ๐ Definitely a step forward for transparency ๐
This is a fantastic example of large-scale curation of public domain books with intentional governance for AI research and use - definitely recommend checking it out, experimenting with the metadata (institutional/institutional-books-1.0-metadata), and starting to build on top of it ๐ค
Today in Privacy & AI Tooling - introducing a nifty new tool to examine where data goes in open-source apps on ๐ค
HF Spaces have tons (100Ks!) of cool demos leveraging or examining AI systems - and because most of them are OSS we can see exactly how they handle user data ๐๐
That requires actually reading the code though, which isn't always easy or quick! Good news: code LMs have gotten pretty good at automatic review, so we can offload some of the work - here I'm using Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct to generate reports and it works pretty OK ๐
The app works in three stages: 1. Download all code files 2. Use the Code LM to generate a detailed report pointing to code where data is transferred/(AI-)processed (screen 1) 3. Summarize the app's main functionality and data journeys (screen 2) 4. Build a Privacy TLDR with those inputs
It comes with a bunch of pre-reviewed apps/Spaces, great to see how many process data locally or through (private) HF endpoints ๐ค