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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

#851
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…

I wonder if they had been more pure technically, would have they been acquired for more than $13 billion? Less? Acquired at all?

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

#852

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.

Assets, mind share, etc. All the things that get sold off in bankruptcy proceedings.

A railroad company also has a huge amount of steel roads with cross country right of ways. You could fire everyone, and it'd still be extremely valuable. It might even be more valuable.

Even in asset-lite software land, "Atari" the name still has a lot of value, even though none of the people are there anymore. They own the right to control the things that the neurons in millions or billions of people's brains are tied to, that their habits tie them to.

Twitter, you can fire almost everyone, make the online square less pleasant for a lot of the people, the network effects truck on. People continue to use it even as they hate using it, because most everyone else is.

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

#853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Translating CUDA kernels to ROCm (or any other ecosystem, tbh) is going to become trivially easy with AI. Not saying that code is the only glue that Nvidia has when it comes to their ecosystem, but it’s certainly a large part of it.

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

#854

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…

DAU

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

#855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality

It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha.

(half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)

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

#857
post #82

Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain. Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.

There will be no antitrust cases unless it's a shakedownx

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

#858
post #626
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's got a noble goal until they get a buyout offer promising to make them a billionaire Edit: Just discovered via this post that hn posts, like the exchanges, filter out emoji

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

[deleted]

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

#859

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…

They are buying the user base.
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