Testing out tools and models

Dipping your toes into AI models and machine learning tools can be intimidating. How do you even get started trying things out? If it were watercolors or playing the guitar, it wouldn’t be such a big deal: you get some supplies, play around, do an awful job, see if you like it… easy-peasy, no harm done.

Testing out an AI model seems a lot more difficult. Maybe you’re scared of or intimidated by:

• Technical prowess: What even is a model, much less more advanced terms like a “transformer” or “instance segmentation?”
• Programming skill: How do I run a Python script, install pytorch, or
• Hardware requirements: Don’t I need a super-fancy computer with a $1000 video card in it to make all of these things work?

Luckily, you don’t need any of these things! A little bit might help, but mostly you just need to cut and paste, click in the right places, and learn a little bit of vocab. But above all, no fear!

In this section we’re going to look at how to test drive AI tools on our own, without relying on signing up for services or being the best coder on the planet.

A simple demo

We’re going to start by building a simple demo with a few clicks. This technique works with almost any Hugging Face model, and allows you to go from an AI spectator to having a shareable demo link in about 2 minutes!

Basic customized examples

Once we’ve build a simple example, we might want to tweak this or that or connect multiple AI tools together.

Our next tutorial will create a template application that we can adjust to support almost any Hugging Face AI model!