What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
Having an account of practically every software engineer remotely interested in AI....Profit
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#832HF 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.
And I would say it's actually a more secure future demand channel than the hyperscalers. Openai and co can build their own chips, so they won't buy from NVidia. But they probably won't sell them to somebody else, so everyone who wants to run their own install (and can, not the least because of HF), will buy Nvidia.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amusingly there is plenty of precedent (link below under Nasdaq Integrated Platform Suffix and the older ACT/CTCI suffixes) for using all of the wonderful character symbols to indicate different classes of securities. Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists. https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvent...
Anything but ISINs, I guess...
I tried for a while to push internally and amongst a few of the markets to move to ISIN, Currency, MIC but yeah…anything but that.
Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win the business.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Imagine how much stuff breaks if they allowed a comma.
Couple examples in my Twitter thread on FinTech outages that were basically that: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1215876962809339904
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#835Earlier 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.
I keep reading this about old.reddit.com and yet I keep using it without being logged in. It must be some kind of A/B testing or slow rollout? Or maybe it's regional?
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SAP isn’t a company to be crazy proud of, but it doesn’t make it not a success nor does it mean “EU is fucked”.
May I remind you that in the US, Facebook is in that same list of top successes? Have you ever heard the phrase “the top minds of this generation of Americans are all working on ads”?
Also, if huggingface is “technically” American, then fuck me, Stripe is technically European. Hell, their CEO is insanely pro europe, pro EU, and a big enabler of projects like EU Inc and lately, the Rhine Group.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#837Earlier quoted context omitted.
NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin... Which other lab shares this? Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model trainin…
> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. Sure, the models are open weight, but porting the code needed to run them on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.
Not with the help of the models!
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#838HF 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.
Locking the next generation of programmers into CUDA
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#839Grim 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…
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T, and so far today the stock is up almost 10%, so that's another $500B. Paying $13B for HF is chump change to them.
NVidia have been making lots of moves recently towards supporting open weight models and local AI, and it makes sense for them to buy HF who support the same, if for no other reason than to prevent someone else like Musk buying them just to shut them down, although I assume they have plans to do a lot more than just keep HF alive.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#840What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
You missed the part about get hacked by one of the cornerstones of the ecosystem so that you could get infinite bad press for them if you wanted.