The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at
a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B —
going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full
acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#132nvidia antitrust incoming
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#133Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still). Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the sof…
NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.
They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin...
Which other lab shares this?
Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN).
There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times. –Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago.
I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field, one of the most responsible orgs in our space. They've been a pillar of open source ML for years now and have made a very positive impact on our ecosystem.
Nvidia is getting a real business generating revenue, and the center of the universe for open models. Both seem like pretty valuable attributes, from Nvidia's perspective.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#135I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#136Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still). Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the sof…
Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source. Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore. Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.
I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that.
Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.
I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#137HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc. If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives? It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on mu…
> what are some alternatives
good old torrents
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#138I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?
Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues: VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise. So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.
That doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart.
In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).
In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#139I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#140Potentially 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.
I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible