391–400 of 953 posts
I really wonder why Nvidia would do this.
Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant
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Very "why would anyone use Dropbox when I can setup a SFTP server" vibes.
Or even “why would I pay for a flight when I can simply walk across the country” It’s all about the convenience, minimising the time and effort from “looks interesting” to “running the model”. Nvidia don’t care if you do it on their cloud, someone else’s cloud, or on your own machine - they win either way, as it further propagates the technology on which they are building their future.
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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
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…
This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
Has always been this way. Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups and unfortunately the founders of these startups mostly take the money.
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?
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…
Now the Open-Models crowd will try to move to some other place. But fragmentation will weaken the position. Yes, there is Civic, there are purely Chinese websites ... for those who speaks Mandarin. Which only reinforces the point.
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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.
Why would China want to crash the AI industry? Their goal is not to damage the United States, necessarily. Their goal is to have the best domestic AI on the planet. They intend to do that through the way that they dominate every other industry: good enough quality at a much greater scale.
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?
And now you've recreated most of HF