I identify as Hugging Face...
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#892This isn't a good thing for open source. Nvidia don't share CUDA, don't open source their drivers, don't support capable but older hardware (forget Pascal etc), and generally charge a premium over competitors for hardware. This acquisition will likely solidify this general stance, reduce free compute allowance for a subscription, cap downloads, push advertising, generally favour models that are Nvidia prescribed or h…
To play devil's advocate: Hugging Face was probably not profitable, and someone has to pay the bills long-term. Nvidia benefits from Hugging Face and the operating costs are pennies to them. For them it makes sense to acquire HF just to keep it running. HF shutting down or self-destructing in the search of profits would be costlier for Nvidia than just buying it now That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a…
Their revenue mostly comes from enterprise deals which are very profitable, and they are in a hot industry with loads of enterprise customers paying them. Storage is also extremely profitable with very fat margins at a large scale like what HF is operating at.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#893Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
I mean EU can cope all it wants, the most successful startup in Germany being a weapons company is all that you really need to know. It is sad how far these countries have fallen and I am German myself.
Germany isn’t exactly great at startups, it’s one of the worst countries in europe to create and scale one. Helsing is doing great in spite of that ecosystem, and thanks to good timing and current geopolitics.
That itself does not reflect on all of EU. Since the UK left, Germany has probably been the worst “special child” of the lot to be honest; their notaries and trade unions are the primary challengers to EU Inc for the most ridiculous reasons for example.
But the talent is here.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#894Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.
Won't work. Businesses need a proven track record before they can buy. With no established history of successes, this plan is already dead on arrival.
Depends who does it. If someone with the track record and budget pulls the rabbit out of the hat swiftly existing customers would at least investigate.
If you maintain a list of shortcommings or good new features it could sound like a sweet deal.
If the company was aquired to shut it down it would work even better.
Marketing is increasingly expensive. Any hype is valuable. One might as well design the product for the promotion.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#895Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences. IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the cons…
This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy. Thes…
This is a lesser-of-two-evils situation. Before acquisitions became the new "meta" in Silicon Valley, the old meta was that gigantic quasi-monopolies, like Microsoft, burn money and man-years embracing, extending, and extinguishing your product.
I heard (literally with my ears, during a pseudo-dinner-thing, so this may be apocryphal, so you may have to do some spelunking through sources) that Microsoft "bought" the source code of some browser-project, for a percentage of the revenues that come from Internet Explorer. The catch was that IE was bundled with Windows for free, so a percentage of zero is zero.
A definite fact, is that when Netscape folded, the industry -- and the investors that got burned by the rapaciousness of Microsoft -- finally got in-sync enough to lobby and agitate for the antitrust lawsuit that almost broke Microsoft up. A consequence of that lawsuit is that quasi-monopolies like Meta, Google, etc, started buying promising startups instead of burying them.
I am not sure that a world where Nvidia just out-spends Hugging Face, via its quasi-monopoly-revenues, is better than the one we are currently in.
If I have to choose between two evils, I'd obviously choose the lesser one. But maybe we can do even better, and choose the absence of evil?
Maybe companies should have "weight-classes" the same way that most sports have those, to match opponents. (After all, despite both being remarkable sportists, Koga cannot defeat Ogawa, who is a few weight-classes heavier). Something like this is how France protects (or tries to) its own small business owners (I am told, they still have many small independent bookstores, despite competition from Amazon, and chain-bookstores before that).
The venture-capital does _somewhat_ balance the scales, but not by much, and it encourages the pursuit of _exits_ instead of _excellence_ (not shaming anyone for taking an exit, I am just saying that the alternative is systematically penalized -- only the very lucky or very protected can pursue excellence).
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#896Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy. I hope nvidia does right by the community. Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
I think he was telling something called a joke. It's funny because S3 is expensive and they just got some money.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#897Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dispos…
From where I’m sitting in Europe, Tesla feels like the disposable car. Gatekeeping repairs and parts and more quality defects needing post shipment corrections than other brands.
To take a concept and refine it to reach mass production is success. It is what made the US what you believe it is today and it is what is creating a healthy supply chain in China. Just look at the challenges of Destin of Smarter Every Day[1] when producing a grill scrubber using only US suppliers and materials.
A “Made in the USA” label is no guarantee of superior design or manufacturing quality to me but if Japan is mentioned I have a greater confidence in the quality of the product.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.
A lot of llama.cpp contributions come from the community and ecosystem, like Unsloth. If something goes awry, I fully expect lots of forks.
There already are a lot of forks for things they decline to implement. TurboQuant, ROCmFPX, and more. I need to set up an agent that will loop on merging them.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#899Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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