# Inference API docs

## Inference API

Please refer to [Inference API Documentation](https://huggingface.co/docs/api-inference) for detailed information.

### What technology do you use to power the inference API?

For 🤗 Transformers models, [Pipelines](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main_classes/pipelines) power the API.

On top of `Pipelines` and depending on the model type, there are several production optimizations like:

* compiling models to optimized intermediary representations (e.g. [ONNX](https://medium.com/microsoftazure/accelerate-your-nlp-pipelines-using-hugging-face-transformers-and-onnx-runtime-2443578f4333)),
* maintaining a Least Recently Used cache, ensuring that the most popular models are always loaded,
* scaling the underlying compute infrastructure on the fly depending on the load constraints.

For models from [other libraries](https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/models-libraries), the API uses [Starlette](https://www.starlette.io/) and runs in [Docker containers](https://github.com/huggingface/api-inference-community/tree/main/docker_images). Each library defines the implementation of [different pipelines](https://github.com/huggingface/api-inference-community/tree/main/docker_images/sentence_transformers/app/pipelines).

### How can I turn off the inference API for my model?

Specify `inference: false` in your model card’s metadata.

### Why don’t I see an inference widget or why can’t I use the inference API?

For some tasks, there might not be support in the inference API, and, hence, there is no widget. For all libraries (except 🌍 Transformers), there is a [mapping](https://github.com/huggingface/hub-docs/blob/main/js/src/lib/interfaces/LibrariesToTasks.ts) of library to supported tasks in the API. When a model repository has a task that is not supported by the repository library, the repository has `inference: false` by default.

### Can I send large volumes of requests? Can I get accelerated APIs?

If you are interested in accelerated inference, higher volumes of requests, or an SLA, please contact us at `api-enterprise at huggingface.co`.

### How can I see my usage?

You can head to the [Inference API dashboard](https://api-inference.huggingface.co/dashboard/). Learn more about it in the [Inference API documentation](https://huggingface.co/docs/api-inference/usage).

### Is there programmatic access to the Inference API?

Yes, the `huggingface_hub` library has a client wrapper documented [here](https://huggingface.co/docs/huggingface_hub/how-to-inference).