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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

#601
Grim prediction:

"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."

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

#602
post #436

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.…

Everyone's got a noble goal until they get a buyout offer promising to make them a billionaire

Edit: Just discovered via this post that hn posts, like the exchanges, filter out emoji

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

#603

The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.

its always the most virtue signaling people (sam on "openess", dario on pretty much every word coming out of his mouth, HF) that ends up doing the worst things because they always tend to extreme. Funny to see them joining the biggest corporation on earth by market cap after the every day virtue signaling of pretty much every employee working for them.

very few people can lock a vision and fight billions dollars with integrity. In tech they mostly end up shadowed. People like JB Kempf with VLC or Bellard. Maybe even Torvald or Jeremy Howard belong to this list of people who could have been way richer than they are now if they wanted to go against their visions and beliefs.

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

#604
Can someone explain how this works? Huggingface serves enormous files and therefore presumably must pay huge cloud fees. As the dot com joke goes, they make a loss on every transaction, but don't worry, they're going to make it up in volume.

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

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_why_ have people started to call companies “labs”?!

Because they are mostly research departments (aka a lab) turned into a corp structure. It’s not a new phenomenon, just that until recently labs didn’t get $1T valuations so you see it more now

Ok, so, what research department did Nvidia grow out of?

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

#606
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…

Hey. I worked there, and I'm no longer bound by their PR policy, so I can mention this. Also, know that the fact that I worked there doesn't make me privy to their high-level strategic decisions, this is a more look from the trenches kind of thing. 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 genuinel…

If that's true, it may bode well for the future. The AI boom creates some strong incentives for Nvidia to develop an intentional strategy for software generally and FOSS specifically, and there's a chance that could influence the rest of the company in a very positive direction. Hopefully, what they learn by working with HF and having the value of their hardware products increasingly determined by their ability to run FOSS software stacks will backwash into the rest of the company, or at least make them much more aware of the problem at all levels.

I do think that they still might be a bit reticent to release fully open-source drivers, though, only because of the extent to which hardware design could be inferred from the driver source. OTOH, AI itself is making disassembling and reverse engineering binary code easier and easier, so there might not be much of a point to withholding the source in the near future.

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

#607
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets. Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others. I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tu…

What would be the worst three?

1. Oracle

2. Microsoft

3. Google

Are probably the worst of the realistic options for acquiring HuggingFace

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

#608

Grim prediction: "Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."

Probably start with the abliterated ones first.

But selling more product is still on thr table until cloud AI starts the real cash drain, then therell be google like shenanigans.

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