HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes through). Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. On the positive note, the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. For Nvidia this is a great strategic play as it potentially gains control of the "AI app store" and can influence the direction of Transformers, Diffusers, PEFT and various other HF libs inits favour. At the same time Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI and has contributed significantly via Nemotron and various optimisers close to the metal. This would likely accelerate further. Nvidia has everything to gain from having a massive open model ecosystem, instead of a consolidated market consisting of 2-3 players. Will that have impact on MLX and other contributions? We'll see!
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#552Remember when Facebook bought Instagram for a BILLION dollars and everyone thought it was insane? THIRTEEN BILLIONS for ONE THING.
When Facebook bought Instagram they basically bought a photo sharing app with 10-50 Million monthly active users. Today it has 3 Billion monthly active users. In hindsight, $1B looks a very good deal for a giant like Instagram. But it wasn't a giant back then, it was just a photo sharing app and it was really insane. So it must not be about the app or the network. Facebook paid that price to enter the mobile social media market as the market leader.
BTW Instagram raised $50 million at the valuation of $500M, just 4 days before the Facebook acquisition. %100 return of investment in 4 days, I think that's insane.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
He said 2 years ago they are okay nowadays (they were not in the past). source: https://diginomica.com/kubecon-china-33-and-third-linux-long...
But he also says why, so he knows as soon as Linux isn't useful for Nvidias revenue anymore they will be gone
All the big boy AI stuff runs on servers, which certainly aren't going to be running on Windows or Mac anytime soon. Linux _is_ what all this NVIDIA hardware is going to run on until... what exactly? FreeBSD overtakes Linux in the server space?
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#554HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing. My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
Yes, this is a real possibility imho.
Having Nvidia behind HF will now probably have a bunch of litigious entities salivating to sue them for not only allowing, but also distributing uncensored AI models that will then be used for deepfakes, porn, spam, scam, hacking, etc.
Sure that could have also been done to HF before, but I'm thinking Nvidia is a much juicier target.
Should also now be much easier for the government to just eventually force NVidia to restrict access to Chinese open models seeing as it will now become an American company that needs to obey to American law and we all know how American AI companies are lobbying for exactly that.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
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.
There is a brand and that brand is really a type of call option that is very hard to price.
If you are doing the valuation using the tools of Ben Graham it is not really going to work.
Damodaran's the Dark Side of Valuation is the text for this.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#556HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing. My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
I don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people. That's the anthropics and openais of the world.
OP said they will bow to pressure, which just means that governments will be able to control nv and get them to ban the obliterated models, implement ’safety’ controls on all uploaded models.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs
Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.
A lot of llama.cpp contributions come from the community and ecosystem, like Unsloth. If something goes awry, I fully expect lots of forks.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as the models run best on Nvidia hardware. What will happen if models are faster on Apple or AMD hardware?
Nvidia being making it clear that other hardware models will permanently not become second class citizens in any way would be a great start.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on a vendor-agnostic inference library. Have 3 backends so far: legacy D3D11 for compatibility, D3D12, and Vulkan 1.3. I have reasons to believe nVidia deliberately crippling Vulkan API for their consumer GPUs. Couple examples to be specific.
nVidia driver sets quite low number for VkPhysicalDeviceLimits::maxTexelBufferElements. I don’t think that’s a hardware limit because I have D3D12 backend doing the same thing on the same hardware.
Vulkan performance is not great on nVidia. On all AMD cards I am testing, Vulkan 1.3 is the fastest backend. On nVidia however, D3D12 is faster despite tensor cores (WMMA / wave matrix multiply accumulate / cooperative matrices) are only available through Vulkan, D3D12 is using shader cores exclusively.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commentin…
> In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.
You're looking this purely through an economic lens, while in reality geopolitical factors play a huge role in what ASML can and cannot do. The US government would likely take an extremely dim view of any new external competitor popping up for their chip foundry industry (especially with all the new US plants being built or planned) and would lean heavily on their vassal/ally the Netherlands to prevent this. Unlike with China, the US has more leverage over the Netherlands[1]
The US security state and US tech giants are joined at the hip, as they have been since the beginning of Silicon Valley[1], right through the Snowden revelations through to the present day[2].
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/08/20/us-preparing-force-netherlands...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/sect...
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#560There goes the neighbourhood.