Ask HN: Why call it "inference" instead of just "model hosting"?

Inference sounds cooler and more mystical. Any old company can host something, "running inference" requires 10x rock star engineers and a CEO that acts like a badass who wears a leather jacket and has Thoughts about demographics.

Same difference between S3 bucket and Google Photos (web). Both "host" images but one provides an experience on top of the underlying assets.

Like so many things in computing, we like to make up words and also reuse old ones for completely different things.

I'd say "hosting" means making something available to you in the cloud. Model makers don't offer that.

They sell "inference," which is a compute task with real hardware costs for them. The task runs against their model, which is not hosted for you.

Are you really hosting the model? Are you making its bed, cooking its food and cleaning up for it?

Inference is what you do with the model. It's not an executable, so you don't run a model directly, instead a separate program runs and that program reads from the model. Also, hosting can be used to mean running inference on a model, but it could also be used to mean just storing the files and possibly making them available for download, so it's a bit more vague.

I wouldn’t say they’re interchangeable. You would have both apply to a model but they have different meanings.

You’d host the model so it’s available to be used.

You’d request it to infer when you wanted to use the model for its purpose.