Hugging Face Inference API: Run 200,000+ AI Models for Free with Python
Hugging Face hosts 200,000+ models. Here's how to use them with Python.
Get Your Free API Key
- Create account at huggingface.co
- Go to Settings → Access Tokens
- Create a token (free)
Install
pip install httpx
Text Generation
import httpx
import os
HF_TOKEN = os.getenv("HF_TOKEN") # Get free at huggingface.co/settings/tokens
API_URL = "https://api-inference.huggingface.co/models"
def generate_text(prompt: str, model: str = "mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1") -> str:
with httpx.Client() as client:
r = client.post(
f"{API_URL}/{model}",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {HF_TOKEN}"},
json={"inputs": prompt, "parameters": {"max_new_tokens": 200}},
timeout=60,
)
return r.json()[0]["generated_text"]
print(generate_text("Write a Python function that sorts a list"))
Image Classification
import httpx
import base64
def classify_image(image_path: str, model: str = "google/vit-base-patch16-224") -> list:
with open(image_path, "rb") as f:
image_data = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()
with httpx.Client() as client:
r = client.post(
f"{API_URL}/{model}",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {HF_TOKEN}"},
json={"inputs": image_data},
timeout=30,
)
return r.json() # Returns list of {label, score}
Sentiment Analysis
def analyze_sentiment(text: str) -> dict:
with httpx.Client() as client:
r = client.post(
f"{API_URL}/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {HF_TOKEN}"},
json={"inputs": text},
timeout=30,
)
return r.json()[0]
result = analyze_sentiment("Python is amazing!")
print(result) # [{"label": "POSITIVE", "score": 0.9998}]
Best Free Models
| Task | Model | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Text Gen | mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Code | bigcode/starcoder2-3b | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Sentiment | distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Translation | Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-zh | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Follow me for more AI Python tutorials! 🐍
Follow for more Python content!
💡 Related: **Content Creator Ultimate Bundle (Save 33%)* — $29.99*