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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

#331

Post by lsofzz »

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.

Dude, where's the src for GPU drivers and the firmware blobs?

Sorry, you can't say it is one of the most open labs without qualifying a proper response to the question above.

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

#332

Post by raincole »

matesz wrote: post #323

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

Why is any file hosting service ever a thing at all, when literally any file can simply be distributed via torrents?

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

#333

Post by wjnc »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #191
dannyw wrote: 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.

I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commenting on.

Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.

On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.

And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.

In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

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

#335

Post by pjmlp »

koolala wrote: post #321
bigyabai wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wish OpenCL was usable today like your implying...

Yeah, OpenCL fandom always blames NVidia instead of Intel and AMD for doing a shitty work.

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

#336

Post by hirako2000 »

matesz wrote: post #323

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

It would be far more efficient to decentralize the data. But HF provides convenience, they subsidize the cost. They gained millions of users, and many enterprises. They can now sell the popularity of their platform. Nobody can buy a p2p network of people.

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

#337

Post by bigyabai »

bayindirh wrote: post #316
bigyabai wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

When last looked at it, NVIDIA was not supporting OpenCL beyond 1.0. Also, when running OpenCL, NVIDIA hardware disables multiple DMA engines, and allows only one memory transfer at a time to prevent OpenCL running as fast as CUDA. Did NVIDIA finally allow open source drivers to access all parts and features of the card to allow feature parity? Last time I checked they were considering a plan for planning a solution…

OpenCL up to 3.0 is ostensibly supported: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-is-now-opencl-3-0-c...

I don't think bits like the GSP firmware will ever be open-sourced, but the opportunity to write better OpenCL drivers has always existed. Some of Nvidia's other proprietary driver backends (eg. GBM, Vulkan) are also decently neglected, but mostly out of disuse rather than malice. I don't think any of these things mean you don't own the hardware.

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

#338

Post by CodinM »

matesz wrote: post #323

Forgive me for newb question, but why Hugging Face is a thing at all? Couldn't models be simply distributed via torrents? And the whole aggregator thing would come down to indexing magent links published by model providers?

Very "why would anyone use Dropbox when I can setup a SFTP server" vibes.

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

#340

Post by ggcr »

Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

Here is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1]

> We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]

I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc.

[1] https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706

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