Essential Hugging Face Skills for Self-Hosting AI Models with Ollama and LM Studio
TL;DR Hugging Face serves as the primary model repository for self-hosted AI deployments, but navigating its ecosystem requires specific skills beyond basic model downloads. You need to understand model cards, quantization formats, and licensing before pulling multi-gigabyte files into your homelab. Start by learning to read model cards on Hugging Face – they contain critical information about context windows, training data, and recommended inference parameters. For Ollama deployments, look for GGUF format models or Modelfiles that reference Hugging Face repositories. LM Studio users should focus on models with clear quantization levels (Q4_K_M, Q5_K_S) that balance quality and VRAM usage. ...