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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

#442
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a clever move if that's what they're doing. They're restricted in China, and are likely to face stiff competition from Chinese chipmakers in the coming years. Acquiring the largest repository of trainable models and ensuring they run better on Nvidia hardware is probably one of the few moves they have for keeping ahead of the competition. I mean, it would be terrible for the consumer, but it does make me think t…

Why would they have to acquire hf in order to optimize their stack for those models?

Couldnt they just take those models anyway?

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

#443
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.

You missed the whole game-ification, enshitification, copilot-ification of github, and open source theft for their AI training episodes

Always like that with Microsoft apologists

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

#444

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 m…

The hyperscalers were stable customers buying far more expensive equipment and NVidia has also made a bank selling a lot of auxillary hardware like Mellanox to AI datacenters.

But the spending spree is probably coming to an end with the looming IPO's and NVidia is probably trying to hedge their bets by making themselves the sure bet once big-AI stops monopolizing RAM and everyone races to get their local setups.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you 15x more sure of that than you were last year?

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it's quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will st…

Hf’s python / transformers is a hot mess. It conflates so many different ideas into huge monoliths that it’s barely usable for anything other than the small snippets listed for trying out models. They need to take a machete to all the cross coupling they’ve metastasized.

Totally not sure why any one would use it for anything other then if they stumbled across it and where completely green.

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

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You missed the whole game-ification, enshitification, copilot-ification of github, and open source theft for their AI training episodes Always like that with Microsoft apologists

Oh yes I can totally believe they use public and private repos for their model training. It is surprising they aren’t ahead of the curve for AI coding like Claude code, codex or cursor because of this.

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

#450

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.

Interesting perspective that makes sense to me. HF is big enough to make the news
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