hjLabs AI Playground

Starting the on-device runtime…

DistilBERT SST-2 — sentiment running in your browser

DistilBERT SST-2 is a 67M-parameter ONNX model that classifies a piece of text by polarity or by the class it was fine-tuned on, with a confidence score. On this page it runs entirely inside your browser: the 69 MB download comes straight from the Hugging Face repository “Xenova/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english” into your browser cache, and every inference after that executes on your own GPU through WebGPU. That is a one-off download of well under a minute on a normal connection, and small enough that integrated graphics handle it without complaint. It is an English-language model; expect quality to fall off sharply on other languages.

At a glance

Hugging Face repository
Xenova/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english
Task
Sentiment
Download size
69 MB
Parameters
67M
Precisions
q8, fp32
Monthly downloads
27k
Languages
en
Runs on
WebGPU in your browser (WebAssembly fallback)
Price
Free — your GPU does the work

The standard positive/negative classifier — 68 MB, near-instant, and reliable on ordinary prose. In practice people reach for a model like this for triaging reviews, support tickets and survey free-text without shipping customer words to a third party.

Available precisions: q8 (8-bit) and fp32 (full precision). q8 comes first because it roughly halves the download at a quality cost you will struggle to measure on this class of model; fp32 is there when you want the reference numbers. It is this playground's default pick for the task, and Hugging Face records about 27k downloads a month for the repository — a good sign that it is maintained and that the ONNX export is not abandoned.

Because there is no inference server behind this page, there is nothing to rate-limit and nothing to bill: the only cost of running DistilBERT SST-2 here is the one-off 69 MB download, and once that is cached the page keeps working with the network switched off.

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Frequently asked questions

How large is the DistilBERT SST-2 download?

About 69 MB for the q8 build, including the tokenizer and config files the runtime also has to fetch — this is the whole payload, not just the weights file. It is downloaded once and then served from the browser Cache Storage API.

Can DistilBERT SST-2 run without a GPU?

Yes, through the WebAssembly fallback, which is slower but works anywhere. WebGPU (Chrome or Edge 113+, Safari 26+) is what makes it feel interactive. On WASM, prefer the smaller quantized build.

Do I need a Hugging Face token or an API key?

No. Xenova/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english is a public repository, so your browser fetches the ONNX files directly over HTTPS. There is no account, no key and no server in between.

Is my data uploaded to a server?

No. The model weights are downloaded from Hugging Face to your browser once, and every inference after that runs on your own GPU through WebGPU. Your text, images and audio are never sent anywhere — hjLabs.in has no inference server and no way to see your input.