From Genes to Memes: The Evolutionary Biology of Hugging Face's 2 Million Models
TL;DR for operators Open-model adoption is usually treated as procurement with a nicer download button: find a model, check the licence, skim the model card, run a few benchmarks, and move on. This paper makes that habit look under-specified. Laufer, Oderinwale, and Kleinberg analyse 1.86 million models on Hugging Face and reconstruct family trees linking models to fine-tuned, adapted, quantised, or merged descendants.1 The useful result is not merely that Hugging Face is large. We knew that. The useful result is that model lineages mutate their public governance signals as they spread. ...