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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

#911

Post by lazarus01 »

with nvidia's dominance as the operating system of AI it further concentrates it's dominance in developer ecosystems, keeping costs high and creating risk as a single point of failure, as there is only one company in the world manufacturing nvidia chips in Taiwan (TSMC), making Taiwan the most important country to the ai industry

nvidia will become the next cisco - this can't last forever

In 2000, Cisco Systems became the world's most valuable company by selling the routers required to build the internet. However, telecom companies bought hardware much faster than consumers adopted internet services. When the monetization gap widened, hardware orders were canceled, Cisco's stock crashed by 80%, and the broader economy fell into a recession. If consumer demand for AI software does not soon match the trillions being spent on Nvidia's chips, a sudden cancellation of orders could wipe out massive amounts of stock market wealth tied to index funds

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

#912

Post by calebkaiser »

DrewADesign wrote: post #873
calebkaiser wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why?

Why I don’t think it’s sustainable to run a compute-intensive business on low monthly plans? If they’re like OpenAI and Anthropic, monthly plan users can spend many times the amount of money in a month than they pay, and unlike regular lower-compute SaaS businesses, overhead increases significantly with usage. That means the more users many of these services get, the more money they lose. Some surmise OpenAI was hidi…

I think maybe just click around Huggingface's site a bit? They don't run a compute-intensive business on low monthly plans. You're describing frontier labs that sell access to their enormous models with subsidized subscriptions, but that's just an entirely different company/model than Huggingface. They've been around in their current form since around 2018. They provide a GitHub like service for hosting and sharing models primarily, and they also provide infra for optimized compute (for training and inference) that you can purchase through them, but you pay as you go for the compute and they have their premium baked into the price.

Their lead advocate just posted this describing things: https://x.com/mervenoyann/status/2092924706508698025

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

#913

Post by runeks »

edg5000 wrote: post #904
empath75 wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if anybody on this website has ever actually done professional software engineering at scale. What a ridiculous take.

13B is a lot for an online platform that hosts weights. What's the special secret sauce that makes this so valuable? The fact that it's the go-to place for public weights?

No secret sauce is needed to be valuable

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

#914

Post by bugglebeetle »

Shocka1 wrote: post #846
esjeon wrote: 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.

This brings back memories of the CVS/Aetna merger for me, which ended up going through of course. Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers have some experts in the ML/AI pipeline, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bat an eye at this one. Hope I'm proved wrong though.

> Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers

Let me stop you right there…

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

#918

Post by MachineMan »

vgeek wrote: post #153
DrewADesign wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times. –Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.

I think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know.

Did he ever find his thumbdrive?

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

#919

Post by AnthonyMouse »

huurtehoog wrote: post #564
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: Liz Lemon has been buying two products together because one of them creates a need for the other. Jack Donaghy: The only thing I will be discussing with the House Subcommittee on Baseball, Quiz Shows, Terrorism, and Media is vertical integration. Liz Lemon: What's vertical integration? Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication. Liz Lemon: Th…

That's not vertical integration though. Vertical integration would be the corn chip maker buying corn farms for example. I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".

> I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".

That's still vertical integration, you're just looking down the tube from the wrong end.

Suppose a company that sells PCs also makes CPUs. That's obviously vertical integration, right? CPUs are part of the supply chain for PCs. Likewise if they make SSDs.

But CPUs and SSDs are also complementary goods. They're both sold to PC OEMs in order to produce the downstream product, or end customers when they build their own PC or want to upgrade a component or two.

Entering both of the complementary markets is vertical integration because the obvious reason for a company to do it is to integrate the separate goods into a single offering:

> then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.

But then they have a perverse incentive. You get a bag with five servings of chips and one serving of medication -- the first hit is free. And you shouldn't need the drug to begin with.

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

#920

Post by MachineMan »

fantispug wrote: post #887
codemog wrote: post #577

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…

Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier. When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment. BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination eff…

From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.
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