What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
161–170 of 951 posts
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#162Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037 ) (Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.) Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue
Yeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off".
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#164This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#165Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037 ) (Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.) Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs
Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#166Great for Nvidia. Bad for the rest of us. Oh well, so much for hugging face.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#167Potentially 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).
You can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there's no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#168I remember when people realized gaming cards could be used for general compute (GPGPU) on certain types of parallel numeric work. It was a very cool thing for many types of hackers and science and engineering students and NVIDIA went far out of their way to ensure we could never buy it.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
See, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with' His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.
Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.
Sales volume has no correlation with how good a company is for an ecosystem. See Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Sony, and so on.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#170The 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.
Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse