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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

#661
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated. I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or…

Brand name is hard to beat. HuggingFace is the defacto leader in open models.

... and there is some of that two-sided market effect that (1) people who want to publish a model will publish on HuggingFace and (2) people who look for models will look at HuggingFace. Even if HuggingFace is poorly run in the future it will be hard to dislodge.

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

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I very much doubt that. Imagine the PR nightmare and potential liability if someone managed to extract from the model credentials in a private repository.

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

#663

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.

Everyone's got a price and NVidia found it

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

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the EU reference in any sense: "The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all. Mistral is…

Sorry but you're talking absolute nonsense, Europe has no global successes? How about... SAP (Germany) - Most of the Fortune 500 run on their software. Spotify (Sweden) Novo Nordisk (Denmark) - most of America is taking their drugs. Airbus (France) - Has out competed and out delivered Boeing for years. Ericsson and Nokia (Finland and Sweden) - Most of American telecom systems use tech from them, essentially the weste…

If SAP appears in a list of successes then clearly EU is fucked.

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

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the EU reference in any sense: "The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all. Mistral is…

China as “second place in any sense” ignores reality. TikTok: achieved global cultural and algorithmic dominance. DJI: controls roughly 70% of the global consumer and commercial drone market. CATL: The world’s largest EV battery manufacturer. BYD: Surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicle production volume. Shein & Temu The list goes on…

Europe will talk tepidly about reusable rockets, China will develop reusable rockets.

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

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the system is what it does. The goal is to increase return on capital. Take a look at the historical developments of wage participation in global income, labor productivity growth vs wage growth, and so forth. It works very well. As long as the most capable laborers are paid well enough to go along, the rest of us have little choice. Especially after citizens united basically privatized American electi…

So where’s the return? Outside of annualized numbers I haven’t even heard people pretend that OAI or Anthropic are profitable. If this is all about ROI there’s sure been a lot of I for as yet unrealized R.

IMO the top end goal is to allow capital to access skill without allowing skill to access capital. IF they can make these products work as advertised (big if, very very big if) the corpos can fire shitloads of low-end workers and give their middle managers access to these AI models and nothing else really has to change.

Workers lose their ability to earn a living, but OpenAI and Anthropic become the gatekeepers to effectively all productivity.

I know I sound tinfoil hat here but I don't see how else the numbers work. The only thing full-priced, profit-earning AI can possibly be cheaper than is, in my mind: as much of the workforce's salaries and cost of benefits as it can manage to offset, put together.

It's a great plan if you're a CEO who can't see beyond the next quarter's earnings call. Less so if you want things like, just pulling from a hat here, a functioning economy, a stable society, the ability for humans at large to live. But it's not like the owning class hasn't been undermining all of that for the better part of 50 years anyway.

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

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vertical integration

"In microeconomics, management and international political economy, vertical integration, also referred to as vertical consolidation, is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is integrated and owned by that company." [emphasis mine] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration

horizontal integration

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

#669
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. I also wouldn’t like to explain to my family why my emoji is more important than being set for life.

It's not just emoji. Using hackernews is much worse than old.reddit.com used to be. Ironically enough, reddit recently killed off old.reddit; you now have to log in, which defeats the point of old.reddit.com totally.

Or use the addon Old Reddit Redirect, which still works as of 2026-08-27.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

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

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little bit of a “the more you know” moment. Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols. For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under. This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information. I honestly would…

NASDAQ at one point wanted to have "special characters" e.g. *()/ etc in ticker names too. EVERYONE said it was a bad idea but they kept pushing it. Repeatedly. Eventually, smarter heads prevailed and they got rid of the idea.

Yeah, they tried to carry the suffix symbology into the ticker itself, but that fortunately died not because of some great sanctity of the symbols but because someone thought it would confuse too much with how ACT and the CTCI protocol handled security categorization.

NYSE (really the access stack that both NYSE and AMEX ran on; the name escapes me since it died back in I think ‘08) has for a long time included a completely separate field in their protocols to indicate classification (preferred, warrants, classes, when issued, etc), but CTCI just jammed it into the symbol field.

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