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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

#201

Post by matheusmoreira »

abixb wrote: post #56
manlymuppet wrote: post #27

Potentially 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).

> I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.

Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.

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

#202

Post by Grombobulous »

kaonwarb wrote: post #192
Grombobulous wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

Yes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer.

They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace.

It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.

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

#203

Post by cyberrock »

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…

>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here

Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA.

[0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...

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

#205

Post by creato »

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…

Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.

Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?

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

#209

Post by 1123581321 »

petterroea wrote: post #28

I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.

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

#210

Post by dingdongditchme »

alansaber wrote: post #170
Conol_ai wrote: post #131

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.

Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse

Yea, my bet is that there is quite a long list of money bags sitting behind the leadership team that will weigh in if the offer is juicy enough.
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