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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

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

#151

Post by theendisney »

herpdyderp wrote: post #63
abixb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.

Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.

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

#153

Post by vgeek »

DrewADesign wrote: post #90
Gigachad wrote: post #64

Earlier 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 think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know.

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

#154

Post by bbor »

392 wrote: post #125
GeertB wrote: post #108

Nvidia'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…

I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer. Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk. There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026). So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.

They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!

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

#155

Post by browningstreet »

what wrote: post #57
browningstreet wrote: post #17

I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.

You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?

Because I never ever see anyone talking about using it, except for occasional reference to weights.

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

#156

Post by bbor »

Gigachad wrote: post #149
Eji1700 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we survive, that is.

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

#157

Post by Grombobulous »

tiahura wrote: post #129
smelendez wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.

Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist. And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.

Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.

IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.

Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.

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

#158

Post by kfse »

binarymax wrote: post #62

Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy. I hope nvidia does right by the community. Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D

The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.

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

#159

Post by qchris »

tiahura wrote: post #129
smelendez wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.

Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist. And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.

The company's name was iRobot, not Roomba.

I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.

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

#160

Post by willy_k »

dannyw wrote: post #133
GeertB wrote: post #108

Nvidia'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…

NVIDIA is a lot more than a “lab”.
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