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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

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

#761

Post by noahbp »

Roark66 wrote: post #673

Soo, what are they buying exactly? Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln? I fail to see the point of this. Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form). Their brand alone surely is not worth this much. So what are they paying for? I worry the answer is, for control over who is allowed to…

>So what are they paying for?

They are paying for an insurance policy. Elon Musk and SpaceXAI must be incredibly interested in buying the company who was the victim of a mass hacking campaign by OpenAI. Any lawsuit, criminal investigation, or slowdown of OpenAI's model training would put OpenAI's massive data center build out, which Nvidia just backstopped, at risk.

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

#762

Post by ctippett »

saberience wrote: post #611
_the_inflator wrote: post #581

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…

Lego (Denmark).

They may not be a financial and industrial juggernaut like the others listed, but cultural significance doesn't have to be all about money.

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

#763

Post by everforward »

mewse-hn wrote: post #708
afpx wrote: 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…

> 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 was puzzled by the comments on the openrouter acquisition saying "they're just a proxy" - they're an open marketplace where models compete head-to-head, they're quite a bit more than just a proxy. Hugging Face has essentially become…

That’s just two sides of the same coin.

They run a proxy for LLM providers, which inevitably creates a marketplace. They’re amazon.com for tokens.

The flip side that others are pointing out is that Amazon is sticky because there’s a sprawling, physical logistics apparatus underneath. You can’t replicate amazon.com’s business without billions of dollars and a decade of building warehouses.

I don’t see where OpenRouter has that. As far as software goes, theirs doesn’t seem particularly tricky. LiteLLM does vaguely similar things, at least for organizations where managing accounts isn’t absurd overhead.

They were first, and there’s money to be made there, but what’s stopping someone else from building LibreRouter that charges a 3% or 4% fee instead of 5%? That’s where I get dubious of their valuation.

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

#764

Post by r_lee »

newswasboring wrote: post #748
r_lee wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not really, I've ran into Github Action downtime and you can't run tests or anything so either you wait or you just let stuff merge and again don't know how this is acceptable in 2026, for a paid CI service and I'm not talking about 6 9s, I mean, 99.5% is terrible

A 99.5 means over one year you will need to wait about 40 hours total for the issue to be solved. What kind of high pressure crud app are you making where this is a problem?

we have technology, 99.5% is embarrassing for a company like Microsoft

it's 2026, not 2016

and that 40 hr may be that over 40 days you just have to randomly stop working if you depend on GHA for something

and why are other services not struggling like this?

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

#765

Post by PhunkyPhil »

randusername wrote: post #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."

The new era of thepiratebay/silk road but for LLMs will be an exciting time

In all seriousness, isn't it pretty straightforward to quantize a model locally? I can do it using mlx in one command.

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

#767

Post by ClarityJones »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #747
hermitShell wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. America needs to repeal citizens united, it's the source of many angles of corruption 2. I think it will happen much sooner than 2245 given how easily capital and the rich are able to move around the globe in 2026 (compared to 1945)

Citizens United is a very sound ruling.

People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.

People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.

We want to encourage private business > limiting liability for owners who do not participate in the business would increase access to capital > we offer corporate forms that shield investors from liability > identity of owners may be kept confidential.

People complain about the wrong thing. The problem isn't that people are allowed to support candidates with their money, buy airtime, etc.. It's that companies have secret owners...

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

#768

Post by Forgeties79 »

hobo_in_library wrote: post #254
Forgeties79 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the formatting and formality that bother me. Say “I looked it up with Gemini,” don’t give me some weak attempt at “proper citation” to legitimize the bare minimum effort you put in.

Why waste keystrokes when less do trick?

Because a facsimile machine isn’t a reputable source lol

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

#769

Post by digitaltrees »

mattstir wrote: post #660
digitaltrees wrote: post #652

This trend to vertical integration is very dangerous. We should not allow the people making tech to control the whole pipeline unless we want a permanent underclass.

Something something Apple. For what it's worth though, I agree that companies _subsuming_ others to obtain complete vertical market capture has been a very dangerous trend.

Apple isnt an analog though, in order to be a relevant analogy they would need to buy Intel, TSMC and ASML and "commit" to preserving access to other people chip manufacturing. As it is, they are guilty of reserving capacity so other producers cant access current generation tech and have to weight a cycle, which I would argue should be blocked as anticompetitive by regulators but we have a perverse definition of free markets now that defines market consolidation and monopoly as markets working instead of recognizing they are a sign that a free market has been captured and destroyed.

rant over.

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

#770

Post by aesthesia »

abrookewood wrote: post #326
jdejean wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://huggingface.co/pricing

I don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why?

This is like asking who is paying for GitHub if you can clone repositories and download code from it for free.
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