Dell has unveiled a partnership with Hugging Face to help it develop open-source generative AI models for Dell’s infrastructure and customers to use. Through the partnership Dell will provide a pre-packaged AI solution.

Hugging Face develops tools for building applications using machine learning and open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models. Dell said it plans to  use the software tools to create a “Hugging Face Dell” portal with dedicated containers and scripts for inferencing and fine-tuning generative AI models, according to a Dell blog.

“Organizations can go to Hugging Face and select a model to fit their needs. Dell will provide tuning to maximize compatibility and performance for their servers,” said Jack Gold, principal analyst with J. Gold Associates. “It’s basically way for Dell to move more of its hardware.”

The service means Dell will consult with a client who uses Hugging Face to pick an open-source AI model that best fits its needs. Dell then takes the model, optimizes it for the Dell PowerEdge server, and provides it to the customer as a “container” it can run on its on-prem server — either a new one they buy from Dell or one they already have, according to Gold.

“The benefit to the customer is time to solution, as they don’t have to build their own model, which could be very expensive and time consuming.,” he said. “…Using an open-source model may not be as accurate a fit as training their own model, but for some uses, good enough is OK,.”

For Dell, the partnership with Hugging Face provides an advantage in selling more servers for AI workloads, which are growing for many companies. Dell will also tell customers what they can safely run on-prem, rather than in the public cloud. Purchasing an AI solution in the public cloud can be expensive and runs the risk of potentially exposing or losing proprietary data.

Shivani Agarwal, a senior consultant with Dell Generative AI Solutions, said the service should help users easily and securely deploy open-source models available on Hugging Face with Dell servers and data storage systems.

“Over time, Hugging Face will release updated containers with optimized models for Dell infrastructure, offering improvement in performance and support for new genAI use cases and models,” Agarwal said in a blog post. “This partnership enables an enhanced user experience on-prem and drastically enhances the time to value for our customers building genAI solutions. Customers can spend less time resolving library and driver versions and identifying dependencies and spend more time developing and implementing.”

Dell is offering services experts and a free-half day facilitated workshop on choosing AI models for business.