Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 953 posts

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#51

Post by sebmellen »

RachelF wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#52

Post by a_wild_dandan »

RachelF wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#53

Post by isatty »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #43
esalman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.

as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.

Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#54

Post by Gigachad »

RachelF wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.

Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#56

Post by abixb »

manlymuppet wrote: post #27

Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits. That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.

I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.

Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#59

Post by keyle »

rjzzleep wrote: post #21

I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects. But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incent…

It also means that finding models that aren't "approved" will be dealt by other websites.
Post reply on HN