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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

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

#572
post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heavily disagree. 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 Nv…

As long as the models run best on Nvidia hardware. What will happen if models are faster on Apple or AMD hardware?

HF CEO keeps posting about how great local models are running in his Mac, it would be funny to see if he replaces his MacBook with a 500W Nvidia laptop after the deal gets through.

But more importantly for business, if HF fails to use the upcoming ASIC inference chips for their ZeroGPU after the acquisition, their competitors using them might have an advantage.

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

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heavily disagree. 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 Nv…

NVidia has a strong interest in profit. The only reason we are allowed to live in chip shangri-la is because they can make a profit out of it, nothing else.

Nothing you wrote contradicts the post you are replying to.

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

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: Liz Lemon has been buying two products together because one of them creates a need for the other. Jack Donaghy: The only thing I will be discussing with the House Subcommittee on Baseball, Quiz Shows, Terrorism, and Media is vertical integration. Liz Lemon: What's vertical integration? Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication. Liz Lemon: Th…

That's not vertical integration though. Vertical integration would be the corn chip maker buying corn farms for example. I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".

It's called a private equity. :-)

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

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to GitHub?

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

That looks roughly like a service being hammered by AI agents starting 2025, with no discernible connection to a 2012 acquisition by anyone.

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

#577
post #551

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 fro…

> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe

HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation.

Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival.

But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.

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

#578

This is the opening move of the end game for the current "AI" wave. Hyperscalers and hardware manufacturers will absorb the overgrowth and hopefully (for them, sucks for us) settle at the top of the software value chain. The only way to make all the money poured into compute for the last 4 years pay for itself at any level is selling people and corporations on very inefficient software for the next couple of decades.…

So anytime someone comes out with something efficient it will get bought and bloated?

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

#579
post #422

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

I heavily disagree. 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 Nv…

If you wanna sell pickaxes to miners, you want a lot of independent miners doing well.

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

#580
post #523

Remember when Facebook bought Instagram for a BILLION dollars and everyone thought it was insane? THIRTEEN BILLIONS for ONE THING.

I think everyone just reads *illion and thinks 'lots of money'. The amounts are incomprehensible at this point. I don't think anyone can conceive of 13 billion dollars accurately, including the people brokering this deal, they're just thinking of bargaining chips and weighing them in comparison to how many they have.

Fun fact: a billion is 10 to 12th power in French and 10 to the power of 9 in English.

A US billion is 1 000 000 000, a French billion is 1 000 000 000 000.

(French as in francophone, not exclusively from France)

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