With the release of the EU data transparency template this week, we finally got to see one of the most meaningful artifacts to come out of the AI Act implementation so far (haven't you heard? AI's all about the data! ๐๐)
The impact of the template will depend on how effectively it establishes a minimum meaningful transparency standard for companies that don't otherwise offer any transparency into their handling of e.g. personal data or (anti?-)competitive practices in commercial licensing - we'll see how those play out as new models are released after August 2nd ๐
In the meantime, I wanted to see how the template works for a fully open-source + commercially viable model, so I filled it out for the SmolLM3 - which my colleagues at Hugging Face earlier this month ๐ค ICYMI, it's fully open-source with 3B parameters and performance matching the best similar-size models (I've switched all my local apps from Qwen3 to it, you should too ๐ก)
Verdict: congrats to the European Commission AI Office for making it so straightforward! Fully open and transparent models remain a cornerstone of informed regulation and governance, but the different organizational needs of their developers aren't always properly accounted for in new regulation. In this case, it took me all of two hours to fill out and publish the template (including reading the guidelines) - so kudos for making it feasible for smaller and distributed organizations ๐ Definitely a step forward for transparency ๐
This is a fantastic example of large-scale curation of public domain books with intentional governance for AI research and use - definitely recommend checking it out, experimenting with the metadata (institutional/institutional-books-1.0-metadata), and starting to build on top of it ๐ค
Inspired by Hugging Face's official MCP server, I've developed a complementary tool that exposes my semantic search API to enhance discovery across the HF platform.
Key capabilities:
- AI-powered semantic search for models and datasets - Parameter count analysis via safetensors metadata - Trending content discovery - Find similar models/datasets functionality - 11 tools total for enhanced ecosystem navigation
The semantic search goes beyond simple keyword matching, understanding context and relationships between different models and datasets.
Example query: "Find around 10 reasoning Hugging Face datasets published in 2025 focusing on topics other than maths and science. Show a link and a short summary for each dataset." (results in video!)
The dataset distils reasoning chains from arXiv research papers in biology and economics. Some nice features of the dataset:
- Extracts both the logical structure AND researcher intuition from academic papers - Adopts the persona of researchers "before experiments" to capture exploratory thinking - Provides multi-short and single-long reasoning formats with token budgets - Shows 7.2% improvement on MMLU-Pro Economics when fine-tuning a 3B model
It's created using the Curator framework with plans to scale across more scientific domains and incorporate multi-modal reasoning with charts and mathematics.
I personally am very excited about datasets like this, which involve creativity in their creation and don't just rely on $$$ to produce a big dataset with little novelty.
Today in Privacy & AI Tooling - introducing a nifty new tool to examine where data goes in open-source apps on ๐ค
HF Spaces have tons (100Ks!) of cool demos leveraging or examining AI systems - and because most of them are OSS we can see exactly how they handle user data ๐๐
That requires actually reading the code though, which isn't always easy or quick! Good news: code LMs have gotten pretty good at automatic review, so we can offload some of the work - here I'm using Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct to generate reports and it works pretty OK ๐
The app works in three stages: 1. Download all code files 2. Use the Code LM to generate a detailed report pointing to code where data is transferred/(AI-)processed (screen 1) 3. Summarize the app's main functionality and data journeys (screen 2) 4. Build a Privacy TLDR with those inputs
It comes with a bunch of pre-reviewed apps/Spaces, great to see how many process data locally or through (private) HF endpoints ๐ค
- I developed a "Reasoning Required" dataset with a 0-4 scoring system for reasoning complexity - I used educational content from HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu, adding annotations for domains, reasoning types, and example questions
My approach enables a more efficient workflow: filter text with small models first, then use LLMs only on high-value content.
This significantly reduces computation costs while expanding reasoning dataset domain coverage.
๐ Introducing "Hugging Face Dataset Spotlight" ๐
I'm excited to share the first episode of our AI-generated podcast series focusing on nice datasets from the Hugging Face Hub!
This first episode explores mathematical reasoning datasets:
- SynthLabsAI/Big-Math-RL-Verified: Over 250,000 rigorously verified problems spanning multiple difficulty levels and mathematical domains - open-r1/OpenR1-Math-220k: 220,000 math problems with multiple reasoning traces, verified for accuracy using Math Verify and Llama-3.3-70B models. - facebook/natural_reasoning: 1.1 million general reasoning questions carefully deduplicated and decontaminated from existing benchmarks, showing superior scaling effects when training models like Llama3.1-8B-Instruct.