04 Mar What is the Hugging Face Access Token

A Hugging Face Access Token is a secure string of characters used to authenticate and authorize access to Hugging Face’s services and resources, such as models, datasets, and the Inference API. It ensures that only authorized users or applications can interact with these resources.

Note: The Hugging Face API key and Hugging Face access token are the same thing.

Remember, you need the token for:

• Accessing gated or private models.
• Using the Hugging Face Inference API.
• Uploading or managing private resources on the Hub.

You don’t need the token for

• Using public models locally via the Transformers Library.

When Do You Need a Hugging Face Access Token?

Let us see what is the need of an access token:

1. Using Private or Gated Models:
   If you’re accessing private models (your own or shared with you) or gated models (e.g., Meta’s Llama 2), you need an access token to authenticate your requests.
2. Using Hugging Face Inference API:
   If you’re using the Hugging Face Inference API (e.g., via HuggingFaceHub in LangChain), you need an access token to make API calls.
3. Pushing Models or Datasets to the Hub:
   If you’re uploading models, datasets, or spaces to the Hugging Face Hub, you need an access token.

When Do You NOT Need a Hugging Face Access Token?

1. Using Public Models Locally:
   If you’re downloading and using public models (e.g., gpt2, facebook/bart-large-cnn) locally via the transformers library, you don’t need an access token. These models are publicly available and can be downloaded without authentication.
2. Using Open-Source Models:
   Many open-source models on Hugging Face are freely available and don’t require an access token for local use.

Note: In this tutorial, we have mostly focused on the public and open-source models.

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