This guide is for platform engineers new to inference. If you need to understand how models and GPUs work together and how to run inference in production, this guide will help. You’ll also learn about the tools to use and how to grow into an inference engineering role.
In an AI-forward organization, platform teams become inference teams. Coding assistants can’t send source code to third parties, and frontier model bills increase month to month. Support tools also need internal data that a hosted model can’t reach.
Organizations want to run these models themselves, and open models now make that practical.
Hugging Face hosts more than two million open models, and the best of them compete with closed models. DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025, and it matched OpenAI’s o1 on math and coding benchmarks about a month after o1 came out . When you run your own model, you control latency, uptime, and where your data goes. At high volume, you can also cut costs by about 80% .
