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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

#341

Post by skohan »

root_axis wrote: post #105
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.

True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.

Yeah I think this is probably one of the best outcomes you could hope for if you want to use open models.

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

#342

Post by reverius42 »

jgilias wrote: post #328
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…

_why_ have people started to call companies “labs”?!

Because making new AI models is a research activity, so the group within Nvidia (or other companies) that does that activity is called a research lab, or just "lab" for short. I don't think anyone is saying that all of Nvidia is a lab (that's just shorthand I guess).

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

#343

Post by girvo »

lsofzz wrote: post #331
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. 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.

"Labs" here specifically means "AI/LLM model lab", which that part of Nvidia is unquestionably one of the most open.

Nvidia is also one of the most closed hardware developers around. Two things can be true.

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

#344

Post by skohan »

tannertech wrote: post #292
Gigachad wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production. Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.

When did apple stop charging more for their memory upgrades then gold by the ounce costs?

They didn't, but their price increases haven't kept pace with general memory price increases (yet) so currently their pricing seems reasonable.

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

#346

Post by ActorNightly »

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?

hugging face is basically a real easy way to run llms. They also provide a bunch of libraries to do things like split compute across all your resources.

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

#347

Post by robocat »

chii wrote: post #256
rvz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest. this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector. It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.

If you don't own the customer relationship, you don't own the profit. See App store, FB.

NVidia is delivering commodity hardware to the hyperscalers, and would eventually get commodity margins (when hyperscalers make their models work on their own hardware).

Amazing article on relevant economics of squeezing vendors - actually about antitrust ad-models but:

  The answer is that [advertising based] companies are an ideal test case for an increasingly common business meta-model, where companies try to create a consumer surplus at one end in order to maximize their negotiating leverage for capturing the producer surplus everywhere else in their supply chain.
https://www.thediff.co/archive/ad-supported-platforms-are-a-...

Perhaps not relevant to huggingface, sorry.

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

#348

Post by silisili »

rvz wrote: post #223
silisili wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that. Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers. I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.

We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux. Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest. Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own…

I'll give credit to Intel, they've always been open source friendly and I prefer to buy them because I'm not a gamer, so don't need the best.

AMD is another story. Their binary closed source blobs were even worse than nvidias for many years. So much so people used terrible performance open source tries just to avoid the headache. That they finally slopped together an open source version after they'd lost the GPU race isn't exactly noble. But as an open source supporter in general, I commend the effort still.

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

#350

Post by skohan »

funlang wrote: post #334

[flagged]

That could be a factor, but the optimistic interpretation would be that they want to support the open ecosystem because it sells more chips.

Models are already largely hardware agnostic. It would be pretty hard to put that cat back in the bag.

I could imagine them building value-added services on top of HF to advantage Nvidia products (i.e. "run this model on NVIDIA cloud" with one-click), but in this moment it's hard to imagine how they could actively disadvantage models built to run on other platforms.

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