Recently, DevOps professionals were reminded that the software supply chain is rife with risk, or as I like to say, it’s a raging dumpster fire. Sadly, this risk now includes open source artificial intelligence (AI) software. Especially after further investigations into Hugging Face (think GitHub for AI models and training data) uncovered up to one hundred potentially malicious models residing in its platform, this incident is a reality check regarding the ever-present vulnerabilities that can too easily catch unsuspecting dev teams by surprise as they work to acquire machine learning (ML) or AI models, datasets, or demo applications.
Hugging Face does not stand alone in its vulnerability. PyTorch, another open-source ML library developed by Facebook's AI Research lab (FAIR), is widely used for deep learning applications and provides a flexible platform for building, training, and deploying neural networks. PyTorch is built on the Torch library and offers strong support for tensor computation and GPU acceleration, making it highly efficient for complex mathematical operations often required in ML tasks.
