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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

#431

Post by teiferer »

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 it sounds cool/sciency.

Just like everything AI is a "model". It's actually not, but it sounds cool/sciency.

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

#434

Post by teiferer »

raincole wrote: post #320
csomar wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are sharing stuff that makes you consume their stuff. Their position with big ai companies is always vulnerable (asics/direct tsmc relations)

> They are sharing stuff that makes you consume their stuff No shit Sherlock. Name one company that shared their code to make you NOT to consume their stuff?

Well if you find that obvious (I also do) then why do you not find their motives in acquiring HF onvious or that this move would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole? Cause it's all kinda the same thing.

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

#435

Post by airspresso »

ismailmaj wrote: post #430

It feels really weird to see this when I keep seeing the CEO and CTO of HuggingFace push for local inference to win.

Nvidia is also pushing for local inference IMHO. They want open models and competition in the model layer, not two big labs controlling all of it.

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

#436

Post by mrshu »

I guess this unfortunately means HuggingFace won't be "the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker" as the cofounders originally intended:

  "When we started the company, a running joke with my co-founders was that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker when you go in the NASDAQ."
  
  -- Clem Delangue (https://unsupervisedlearning.substack.com/p/the-future-of-open-vs-closed-source)

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

#437

Post by DanielHB »

ismailmaj wrote: post #430

It feels really weird to see this when I keep seeing the CEO and CTO of HuggingFace push for local inference to win.

Why? If anything it makes complete sense:

1) Local inference means more general GPUs and less ASIC hardware. Only big companies can push ASIC because of the software required, meanwhile nVidia owns cuda which is the standard.

2) Local is less resource-efficient per chip (chips remaining idle much more, meaning more chips required).

3) End-customers have less bargaining power compared to hyper-scalers. Although this might change if customer hardware start behaving more like phones (SoC with everything packed in), but even then the SoC makers will likely still have less bargaining power than hyper-scalers. But then nVidia could potentially make the whole SoC too.

So overall local-inference users = higher profit margins for nvidia. They much rather have every business on the globe buy one nvidia rack (or every laptop have a beefy GPU) than have 5-10 hyperscalers buy a few hundred thousand.

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

#438

Post by teiferer »

aurareturn wrote: post #418
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…

Arguably, this move will help AI open source market more. Nvidia has an incentive to make AI open source competitive with closed source. If OpenAI or Anthropic gains in market share, they will eventually gain power over hardware vendors as well, which Nvidia does not want. Nvidia wants people and companies to go choose a free open model, run that model on Nvidia hardware. And because Nvidia can't fully control what h…

Dude, the source of an LLM is the training data and the training algorithm. Those are not open, so stop calling it open source.

Open weights correspond to "binary available" for software. Nobody would call that "open source".

(Even ignoring the licensing which "open source" normally entails.)

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

#439

Post by allyant »

doe88 wrote: post #422

Nvidia for Hugging Face will be even worse than Microsoft for GitHub and we know now how low the bar is here.

To be fair Microsoft haven’t done as much integration with their eco system; such as integrating it with Azure DevOps as they could. And long may it continue.

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

#440

Post by hnlmorg »

reverius42 wrote: post #342
jgilias wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_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).

What amuses me is that “lab” is shorthand for “laboratory” and virtually no computer research happens inside a room people would typically call a lab.

It’s a little like the trend of calling developers “engineers”. There’s no actual engineering in the traditional sense but I’m sure developers think it sounds cool to call themselves that.

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