Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

731–740 of 953 posts

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

#731
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could they control other hardware models? This is just one company. If other hardware is better and they don’t provide access to it, won’t people just leave HF?? Is this somehow more of a monopoly than I am imagining?

Yes, they could just say they're taking it towards prioritizing models that only run on one kind of equipment and making it harder to find, support or list models that run on different hardware. The acquisition sets up corporate interests to be able to increasingly drive it. I hope better for Nvidia and hopefully it can be cleared up, and maintained.

Exactly. Just tweaking the order of suggested models for a search query could already have a huge impact on model popularity.

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

#732

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.

Have you seen the numbers for public companies?

We can't discuss the finance of private companies so we have to wait for their IPO, acquisition by some public company, or bankruptcy to find out more.

The story written in the public numbers, from corporations or government statistics, is one of rise in factor productivity, rise in capital returns, and decline in wage participation in overall income.

I'm merely observing that it seems to be the latest chapter in the development of the capitalistic corporation.

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

#734

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."

Also very silly prediction given this would dramatically lower the amount of models hosted on HuggingFace and move users elsewhere to platforms that do support quantized models (not what Nvidia wants).

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

#735
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…

> No need to quote Linus Torvalds here.

100%

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

#736
post #644

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."

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…

"don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated"

I'm ready to be wrong but doesn't this describe basically every tech acquisition for the last 25 years or longer?

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

#737
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…

America is headed towards techno zaibatsu economy. Just a product of the dynamics of capital and power. Too much cash, Nvidia is forced to try and find ways to deploy excess capital very quickly. Most efficient way is to absorb players in emerging industries, bet on the potential for growth in new markets to help keep ROI up. It is a great day for startups, the goal is to sell out and get rich, no? INB4 China comes i…

I don't know why I've never drawn a line from our current situation to the zaibatsus, that's a great insight.

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

#738
post #111

Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037 ) (Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.) Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...

Nvidia is promoting "unmetered intelligence". Jensen wants everyone to have a spark dgx with an nvidia chip in their home.

Wasn’t Huang the guy who said your $500K employee should burn at least half his salary on tokens? I don’t think Nvidia is focused on cost-effective general computing for anybody.

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

#739
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?

SpaceX

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

#740
post #644

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."

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…

First mover advantage. The first big company with the most customers stays the de-facto leader of that industry/product. Later OpenRouter and HF will start building moats to keep their customers from easily leaving. That's why everyone's still on GitHub despite it blowing chunks every week. Too painful to move.
Post reply on HN