We are excited to share that Public AI is currently a supported reasoning provider for facehubs to hug! Public AI joins a growing ecosystem and directly enhances the breadth and capabilities of serverless inference on the hub’s model page. Inference providers are seamlessly integrated into the client SDK (both JS and Python), making it easy to use different models using preferred providers.
The launch will make public and sovereign models easier than ever before from institutions such as Swiss AI Initiatives and AI Singapore. You can browse public AI organizations at the hub at https://huggingface.co/publicai and try out supported models at https://huggingface.co/models?inference_provider=publicai&sort=treending.
Public AI Inference Utility is a non-commercial, open source project. The team builds products and organizes advocacy to support the work of public AI model builders such as the Swiss AI Initiative and AI Singapore.
Public AI inference utility runs on a distributed infrastructure that combines a backend with VLLM and a deployment layer designed for resilience across multiple partners. Behind the scenes, inferences are processed by servers exposing OpenAI compatible APIs to VLLM and deployed to clusters donated by domestic and industry partners. The global load balancing layer ensures that requests are routed efficiently and transparently, regardless of which country’s computers are providing the query.
Free public access is supported by donated GPU times and advertising grants, but long-term stability is aimed at being fixed by state and institutional contributions. Learn more about Public AI platforms and infrastructure at https://platform.publicai.co/.
Now you can use the Public AI Inference Utility as a Closing Face Inference Provider. I’m looking forward to what I’ll build with this new provider.
Learn more about using public AI as an inference provider on our dedicated documentation page.
See the list of supported models here.
How it works
In the website UI
In User Account Settings, you set your own API key for the provider you signed up for. If no custom key is configured, the request is routed through HF. Order a provider if you like. This applies to model page widgets and code snippets.
As mentioned before, when calling an inference provider there are two modes: a custom key (the call goes directly to the inference provider, using the corresponding inference provider’s own API key) (in that case no tokens are required from the provider.
The model page introduces third-party inference providers (compatible with current models sorted by user preferences)
From the client SDK
I’m using Huggingface_hub from Python
The following example shows how to use Swiss AI’s Apertus-70B using public AI as an inference provider. Automatic routing through a hugging face can be used with a hugging face token, or your own public AI API key if you have one.
Note: This requires using a recent version of Huggingface_hub (>=0.34.6).
Import OS
from huggingface_hub Import Inference client=Inference client(provider=“publicai”,api_key = os.environ(“HF_TOKEN”) ) message = ({
“role”: “user”,
“content”: “What is the capital of France?”
}) complete = client.chat.completions.create(model =“Swiss-Ai/Apertus-70B-Instruct-2509”message = message,)
printing(complete.choices)0). message)
From JS using @huggingface/Incerence
Import { inference } from “@Huggingface/Inference”;
const Client= new inference(process.Env.hf_token);
const chatcompletion = wait client.ChatCompletion({
Model: “Swiss-Ai/Apertus-70B-Instruct-2509”,
message:({
role: “user”,
content: “What is the capital of France?”,},),
Provider: “publicai”,});
console.log(ChatCompletion.Choices(0).message);
Request
At the time of writing, using the public AI reasoning utility by hugging a facial reasoning provider is free. Pricing and availability may vary.
Here’s how billing works for other providers on the platform:
For direct requests, i.e. when using keys from inference providers, the corresponding provider will be billed. For example, if you are using a public AI API key, your public AI account will be billed.
For routed requests, i.e. when authenticating through a facehub that hugs, you only pay the standard provider API rate. There is no additional markup from us. It simply passes the provider’s costs directly. (In the future, we may establish a revenue sharing agreement with our provider partners.)
Important Memopia users get $2 worth of inference credits each month. You can use them between providers. 🔥
Subscribe to our Hugging Face Pro plan for access to inference credits, Zerogpu, Spaces Dev Mode, 20x high limits and more.
We also infer small allocations for sign-in free users for free, but upgrade to Pro if possible!
Feedback and next steps
We want to get your feedback! Share your thoughts and comments here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface/huggingdiscussions/discussions/49
