Hugging Face Hub Models

The Hugging Face Hub hosts 500K+ pre-trained models. Here are the most useful free models by category.

How to find models

1. Browse by task: huggingface.co/models — filter by task, library, language
2. Trending: huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
3. ONNX-ready: huggingface.co/models?library=onnx — can run in browser

Top Free Models by Task

Text Generation (LLMs)

Model	Parameters	License	Notes	Link
Llama 3.1 8B	8B	Llama 3.1	Meta's latest, instruction-tuned	HF
Mistral 7B	7B	Apache-2.0	Fast, high quality	HF
Gemma 2 9B	9B	Gemma	Google's open model	HF
Phi-3 Mini	3.8B	MIT	Microsoft, small but capable	HF
Qwen2.5 7B	7B	Apache-2.0	Strong multilingual	HF
TinyLlama	1.1B	Apache-2.0	Smallest useful LLM	HF

Text Embeddings

Model	Dimensions	License	Best For	Link
all-MiniLM-L6-v2	384	Apache-2.0	Fast semantic search	HF
bge-small-en-v1.5	384	MIT	RAG / retrieval	HF
e5-large-v2	1024	MIT	High quality embeddings	HF
gte-base	768	MIT	General purpose	HF
nomic-embed-text-v1.5	768	Apache-2.0	Long context (8K)	HF

Image Generation

Model	Resolution	License	Notes	Link
Stable Diffusion XL	1024x1024	CreativeML Open	Best open image gen	HF
Stable Diffusion 3	1024x1024	Stability Community	Latest SD	HF
FLUX.1 Schnell	1024x1024	Apache-2.0	Fast generation	HF
Kandinsky 3	1024x1024	Apache-2.0	Multilingual prompts	HF

Speech & Audio

Model	Task	License	Notes	Link
Whisper Large v3	Speech-to-text	MIT	Best open ASR, 100 languages	HF
Bark	Text-to-speech	MIT	Multilingual, sound effects	HF
MusicGen	Music generation	CC-BY-NC	Text-to-music	HF
Wav2Vec2	Speech recognition	Apache-2.0	Fine-tunable	HF

Object Detection

Model	Objects	License	Speed	Link
YOLOv8	80 COCO classes	AGPL-3.0	Very fast	HF
DETR	91 COCO classes	Apache-2.0	Medium	HF
OWL-ViT	Open vocabulary	Apache-2.0	Slow	HF
Grounding DINO	Open vocabulary	Apache-2.0	Medium	HF

Segmentation

Model	Type	License	Link
SAM	Segment Anything	Apache-2.0	HF
Mask2Former	Panoptic segmentation	MIT	HF
SegFormer	Semantic segmentation	Apache-2.0	HF