DISASTER.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
351–360 of 952 posts
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#352I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
Is huggingface profitable?
I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#353Forgive 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?
There's a herding effect with torrents where popular things are quick to get, unpopular things may be very difficult to get, because the majority of users delete files to save space.
I might host 3 or 4 models that I've downloaded recently, but I won't be hosting the 50 or so that I've tried in the last two years.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#354Forgive 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?
The important thing about HuggingFace isn't the safetensors files, it's the READMEs and the Google search placement. It's easy to reproduce their distribution with torrents, it's very hard to then establish yourself as the default option.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#355Nvidia'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.
Nvidia’s history with linux shows the opposite. And as a user running models on a linux/AMD stack, this information does not fill me with hope.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#356Forgive 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?
And who seeds it? If you're going to pay a host to seed it, they might as well just provide HTTP and let you add them as a web seed to your torrent, which we could be doing already.
But if you don't pay a host to seed it, either the host's business model won't play well with torrents, or there's no host and a torrent will rot.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#357Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain. Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago. I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are…
Can someone help me out - who pays for things on HF? Are they charging the model providers?
It's not too dissimilar from GitHub, but geared towards ML. They have a 9/mo pro plan for individual users for upgraded storage/usage, and an enterprise version of Hub that larger orgs can pay for. I think the enterprise has some contract minimum + 50/mo per seat. https://huggingface.co/pro
They also have inference endpoints with metered prices, and their spaces product (though i'd imagine this is a smaller portion of revenue).
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> zero/trivial national security
Huh?
Robots with vision + sounds sensors and connected to the internet in professional homes across your country are definitely a security issue.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/robot-vacuum-deebot-e...
One of the leaked images taken by Roomba robot vacuums shows a lady sitting on her toilet - personal.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#360This isn't a good thing for open source.
Nvidia don't share CUDA, don't open source their drivers, don't support capable but older hardware (forget Pascal etc), and generally charge a premium over competitors for hardware.
This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads, push advertising, generally favour models that are Nvidia prescribed or have been sponsored, and potentially ban models and datasets that are deemed risky legally (abliterated etc).
I see no other reason why Nvidia would want this kind of vertical.