Support for Hugging Face Inference API in Weaviate

Vector databases like Weaviate use Machine Learning models to offer various functionalities such as summarizing text, auto-labeling data tokens, converting data into vectors for context-based queries, etc. However, running model inference in production is challenging due to the need for expensive specialized hardware and underutilization of resources. Companies like Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Cohere offer running model inference as a service. Weaviate v1.15 introduces support for Hugging Face Inference API, allowing users to use pre-trained sentence similarity models or upload their own private models. The integration is fully automated and optimized, with the option to choose between text2vec-huggingface and text2vec-openai modules.