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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

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People yes. Corporations no.

What is a corporation but people? Companies are groups of people. They're one or more owners, some managers, possibly some staff. If you take away all the people, then there's nothing there.

A corporation is a liability and pseudonym shield.

A corporation having contribution rights multiplies the otherwise imposed contribution limits on the underlying humans.

A corporation allows tax planning opportunities not afforded to the bottom 90-ish percent of the country (such as shifting income to alternate years to avoid progressive taxation, and utilizing expenses to lower that income in ways a W2 cannot)

Corporations are granted benefits that people do not get, and CU disturbs the balance of power.

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

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a corporation but people? Companies are groups of people. They're one or more owners, some managers, possibly some staff. If you take away all the people, then there's nothing there.

Legally, the corporation itself is similar to a person and has rights unto itself, as stupid as that sounds. Those rights are different from those the individuals who run the company have.

exactly. A corporation is as much a person as it has the genes that make a human.

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

#814
post #617

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…

A global non USA success? Plenty. You might want to remove your pink USA glasses and look around. Spotify good enough for you?

Has Spotify made money yet?

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

#815
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…

They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?

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

#816
post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That stopped working for me on my mobile firefox (but not on my desktop) literally yesterday. It's pretty clear they're doing some kind of A/B testing.

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

#817

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…

The list goes on for products and services they cloned from western innovation. China didn't get there first in any of the categories you listed. Of course, people would rather spend less than more, disregarding the quality and longevity of the product.

Paying pennies on the dollar for a BYD vehicle sounds great when all you consider is the initial sticker price. The real cost is what happens after you buy the disposable car and own it for a decade.

So yea. Second place is the reality and it is also true for AI models, and the hardware needed to run them.

Also, congratulations on landing a rocket 11 years after the US.

Took long enough.

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

#818
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…

> Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI

Nothing paradoxical about it, open source AI use raises demand for nvidia's chips too.

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

#819
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…

I think a close analogy is Github. The base infrastructure is open source and replicable, and still there's a virtuous cycle that keeps people choosing it over the alternatives.

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

#820
post #761

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.

Any DA can investigate it, they don't need Musk or some other big tech dipshit to tell them otherwise. Real crimes were committed and no charges are being pressed.
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