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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

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

#301
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what's scarce.

Someone with financial / decision making weight their is going to ask why they are commoditizing models that run on "others" GPUs .... Since doing that makes their gpus less of the scarce resource..

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

#302
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues: VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise. So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.

That doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart. In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github). In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace w…

> But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate.

From Nvidia's side? You get to keep the shell game of where your money and hardware are going spinning on the table for a little longer. If the party stops, Nvidia loses a zero right off their valuation instantly.

And, as a side benefit, you get to place your thumb on the scale of the open-weight hosting ecosystem. And maybe even fund a Chinese Anthropic or OpenAI at a discount.

OpenAI just popped out an inference ASIC. Google is on their 8th generation of TPU. Graviton is out from Amazon. The hosting companies want Nvidia out of their finances. Full stop. Nvidia has to do something, or it's going to get swept away.

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

#303
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…

As a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it's quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will still be happy to host I am sure why not China?

The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don't use that and don't see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.

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

#304

HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc. If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives? It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on mu…

I don't know anyone who "finds" models on HF. The announcements always come through Reddit, HN, Xitter, and various Discords. HF is just a place where some people bought a domain name, spun up a file server, and struck it rich. If they went away tomorrow, they'd be replaced the next day.

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

#305
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

CUDA is proprietary for a pretty understandable reason. There's no good way for Nvidia to standardize it.

They supported OpenCL when Khronos floated the idea of a GPGPU standard to manufacturers, but OEMs didn't want to design scalable hardware or sponsor the software.

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

#306
post #133
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…

They are sharing stuff that makes you consume their stuff. Their position with big ai companies is always vulnerable (asics/direct tsmc relations)

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

#307
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do own the hardware. Nvidia GPUs have FOSS driver alternatives (Nouveau, NOVA) and have supported OpenCL on the proprietary drivers since 2009.

If you don't want to use CUDA, they expose the PTX bindings to write your own CUDA alternative too: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/index...

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

#308
post #158

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.

> billionaires and centi millionaires

I think you mean hecto-millionaires.

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

#309
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.

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.

Fair, but the biggest mistake by far was failing to take charge of the immigration debate. The second biggest was his press secretary's insistence on announcing that everything was fine in the economy over and over as a distant second. Third was not resigning when it became clear that he couldn't really keep up with the job, or at least not trying to run for a second term. Virtually nothing else matters by comparison.

Fear over economic damage due to immigration is perhaps the last remaining unifying force among the American political right wing. Biden actually did a lot of good things as president -- arguably a lot more good than he did in his time as senator. But his administration was too eager to just run the federal government as a quiet meritocracy and avoid dealing with any of the hot political issues of the day. He and his administration fucked up so bad that now not only is most of that good undone, but we are in a dire existential situation, facing generational-scale damage that might be unfixable.

It's one thing that they genuinely fumbled the handling of the huge immigration/refugee waves spanning the entire continent and it took them well over a year to start coordinating a response (which they never really did apart from eventually just closing the border) -- it's another that they kept trying to insist everything was fine, there was no problem, there's nothing to see here. People were freaking out about it all over the country, and of course they were being heavily propagandized, but that's not the point. A strong and proactive White House would have made all the propaganda look stupid. Instead, it looked like the truth.

It's absolutely mind-boggling to look back on just how weak the president had to have been from 2020-2024, to somehow let the party of Jan 6 and the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic regain enough control of the political narrative to make Trump seem like anything other than a narcissistic mobster.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Won't work. Businesses need a proven track record before they can buy. With no established history of successes, this plan is already dead on arrival.
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