Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
I miss the Biden administration
That's a sad thing to have to say, but yeah.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
141–150 of 953 posts
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#142The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.
Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#143Like some other folks, I wonder whether this will be a good thing, or a bad thing.
I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#144Looks like owning the hardware wasn't enough and they want to own the ecosystem as well
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#145I'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…
Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?
> Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models?
No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#146I really hope they retain and pay Georgi Gerganov. We are toast without ggml.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#147Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#148The 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.
Well, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#149Potentially 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.
Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.
Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production.
Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#150Nvidia'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 trainin…
lol “Everything you said is correct but you’re wrong because I’m thinking about something other than what you were talking about”