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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

#191

Post by matheusmoreira »

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 one of the most open labs.

Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement.

I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.

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

#192

Post by kaonwarb »

Grombobulous wrote: post #157
tiahura wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

iRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)

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

#193

Post by wilburx3 »

bbor wrote: post #154
392 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah, the price is weird as fuck.

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

#194

Post by heliosAtwork »

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

They need to switch to egrees free cloudflare R2!

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

#197

Post by Grombobulous »

Grombobulous wrote: post #157
tiahura wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.

These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.

E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.

I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.

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

#198

Post by rezonant »

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.

Did you just quote an LLM as a citation? That's not how citations work.

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

#200

Post by latchkey »

rvz wrote: post #118
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 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.

> no-one cares anymore.

possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.

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