π€ Sentence Transformers is joining Hugging Face! π€ This formalizes the existing maintenance structure, as I've personally led the project for the past two years on behalf of Hugging Face! Details:
Today, the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab is transferring the project to Hugging Face. Sentence Transformers will remain a community-driven, open-source project, with the same open-source license (Apache 2.0) as before. Contributions from researchers, developers, and enthusiasts are welcome and encouraged. The project will continue to prioritize transparency, collaboration, and broad accessibility.
We see an increasing wish from companies to move from large LLM APIs to local models for better control and privacy, reflected in the library's growth: in just the last 30 days, Sentence Transformer models have been downloaded >270 million times, second only to transformers.
I would like to thank the UKP Lab, and especially Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych, both for their dedication to the project and for their trust in myself, both now and two years ago. Back then, neither of you knew me well, yet you trusted me to take the project to new heights. That choice ended up being very valuable for the embedding & Information Retrieval community, and I think this choice of granting Hugging Face stewardship will be similarly successful.
I'm very excited about the future of the project, and for the world of embeddings and retrieval at large!
π New blog: Maintain the unmaintainable β 1M+ Python LOC, 400+ models
How do you stop a million-line library built by thousands of contributors from collapsing under its own weight? At π€ Transformers, we do it with explicit software-engineering tenets, principles that make the codebase hackable at scale.
π Inside the post: β One Model, One File: readability first β you can still open a modeling file and see the full logic, top to bottom. β Modular Transformers: visible inheritance that cuts maintenance cost by ~15Γ while keeping models readable. β Config-Driven Performance: FlashAttention, tensor parallelism, and attention scheduling are config-level features, not rewrites.
Written with @lysandre,@pcuenq and @yonigozlan, this is a deep dive into how Transformers stays fast, open, and maintainable.