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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

#381
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's probably easier to say this in retrospect, they were eliminating a direct competitor to their core business. Something so advantageous it should have been blocked by regulators. I can't see this as being as good of a purchase, especially when it's 13x the price of what was seen as an absurdly large amount back then.

You are very good at bringing up irrelevant numbers and missing the forest for the trees

You are right, we are in a post numbers and reality economy.

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

#383

This 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 h…

Nvidia does frequently release new OSS Nemotron models where they implement new mechanisms.

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

#384

This 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 h…

To play devil's advocate: Hugging Face was probably not profitable, and someone has to pay the bills long-term. Nvidia benefits from Hugging Face and the operating costs are pennies to them. For them it makes sense to acquire HF just to keep it running. HF shutting down or self-destructing in the search of profits would be costlier for Nvidia than just buying it now That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a…

Why do you think it ‘probably was not profitable’ it has a dominant position and there are many ways to monetise that.

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

#385
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?

You are not the first or 100th person to come up with this idea. I don't really get it either but there must be a reason it hasn't really happened.

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

#386
Also consider:

Nvidia is investing $1 billion in Poolside and paying $6 billion to license its technology and hire most of its engineers.

They are the elephant in the room, with their CDS sky-high. Sounds like they are opinionated on the whole AI thing, trying to drive this with open-source models, countering OpenAI using Jalapeno.

Looks zero-sum for the players.

All the while Google silently planning to get milk from all layers.

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

#387
AI companies seeking to release their own chips and Apple Metal and other unified memory solutions will all eat into Nvidias high margin GPU sales.

This can only be bad news, Nvidia didn’t buy hugging face to be good custodians but for business reasons.

Let’s hope an alternative platform emerges and takes off.

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

#388
post #373

This 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 h…

While nvidia may not want open source drivers, they want open weight models and this acquisition allows them to keep pushing for that. Commoditize your complement.

Nvidia don’t fundamentally care about open weight models

They care about their high margin GPUs being the dominant platform, otherwise they would have to reduce the price of their gpu/increase vram amounts.

Nvidia are making truck loads of money and want it to continue

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

#389

[flagged]

Do they really need HF for that?

Dgx Spark and Strix Halo have very close specs and deliver similar performance. If nvidia makes their stack be more efficient with for example 50% more tockens on similar hardware specs agaist competitors, they don't need HF.

My take is that Chinese Labs, though slightly behind on the frontier (due to compute constraints) are on a trajectory to surpass Western labs (this is me speculating, reasons are better ecosystem creation on China's part and potentially better/more data environment). Qwen-3.5-122b was the king in it's category and noone came up with something better, even though many tried like poolside with laguna. Similar with 35b and 27b param models. I think poolside and HF acquisitions show us that nvidia really wants to have competitive models on the prosumer (~100-150b param size) and likely at the 300-500b as well. Together with a hardware to run them that's a good market to be in. And as the recently rumored Xiaomi AI cube shows us (together with gorgon/medusa halo and mac studios), this is a market segment that will have competition.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

Risk management. Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation. Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.

If their stock moves up more than third of percent due to this they have won... The math at these valuations get somewhat extreme. But there is some logic in it.
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