461–470 of 955 posts
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The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
> billionaires and centi millionaires I think you mean hecto-millionaires.
I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
Very optimistic to say this will not have profound effects on the whole industry.
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…
My impression I've developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia's relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don't know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it.
Here's an anecdotal "success story" which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise.
So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new "feature" which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run "jobs", including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of "help" from AI. I was tasked with testing it.
Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the "distributed" part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle's MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle's product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle's proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn't support the "distributed" part of the "solution". It was pitched as the "first step on the way there".
So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the "solution" doesn't solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back.
I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the "solution" had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn't do a research. He just used what he knew.
Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn't face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.
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> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement. I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.
> > NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. > Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement Then why don't they sell consumer GPUs with tons of memory. They clearly segment the market into consumer versus server/business.
Nvidia for Hugging Face will be even worse than Microsoft for GitHub and we know now how low the bar is here.
Nvidia has a strong interest in open source AI being a strong contender to proprietary models. They don't want a single AI company to win, as that company would then have enormous leverage over Nvidia, and could perhaps even erode the Cuda moat with their own chip spending.
They want the AI market to be hypercompetitive, with AI companies focusing on competing amongst themselves instead of with Nvidia on one side, and many self-hosters / small inference providers buying Nvidia GPUs for large open models on the other.
It's in Nvidia's business interest to be a good steward of Huggingface, while being a good steward of Github is at best incidental to the interests of Microsoft.
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>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA. [0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...
He definitely sounds more pragmatic than before, which is, in a sense, more positive. > This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.