Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 117 posts

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#81

Post by bigyabai »

sschueller wrote: post #16
echelon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hugging Face has no path to substantial profitability and the investors and employees want liquidity. Nvidia doesn't want this to look like a bubble pop (as they have lots of GPU data center build outs to complete), they've got plenty of cash on hand, and they're an extremely good natural fit for the company. Nvidia is seeing its top frontier model customers develop their own chips to sidestep Nvidia and as a counter…

> Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem Wasn't always the case and will probably only be as long as there is a self interest. > Linus Torvalds himself noted that the AI boom changed NVIDIA, turning them into a much better contributor to the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds: AI CHANGED NVIDIA.

It generally was always the case. Nvidia was a huge stakeholder in technologies like OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan, supporting Khronos' goal to further expand the FOSS API ecosystem.

Linus is probably referring to Nvidia's "open" driver series and capitulation on EGLStream. Nvidia got a terrible reputation for refusing to implement GBM for Wayland desktops, insisting on the nonstandard EGLStream protocol for close to a decade. Around 2024 (550-series drivers) they gave up and reworked their drivers for GBM-agnostic usage, fixing Wayland and generally resolving the biggest gripe people had against Nvidia hardware.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#82

Post by himata4113 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #72
sealthedeal wrote: post #42

These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature on the founders/board.

Overheard: "It would be a shame if Hugging Face had to press charges for hacking against your best customer. Perhaps if I was busy counting my money, it might slip my mind."

I doubt that would go anywhere, but this is a very funny joke regardless!

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#83

Post by bdcravens »

ishtanbul wrote: post #57
Grombobulous wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not forget to give credit to his family office. High net worth individuals don’t just personally do things like make investments themselves. They hire experts to do that. Sure, at some point Kevin Durant made the high-level decision that he wanted to invest in high-growth startup companies. But there’s a very low chance that he’s working the day-to-day of that process.

I’d put it close to zero. He was likely presented with the deal once it was sourced and reviewed by his investment team, who likely did 100% of the work. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make the final decision, but pro athletes dont have time to do much investing work beyond high level networking and approving deals.

Durant is more than just an athlete who gets suggestions from those who handle his investments; he co-founded a venture firm ten years ago that has invested in over 100 companies.

https://www.hustlefund.vc/post/angel-squad-kevin-durant-inve...

While it's true he may not "do the work" and relies on those he's hired, the same is true of the Mark Cubans of the world.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#84

Post by doublerabbit »

par wrote: post #75

Is it feasible for someone else to just start something almost identical by hosting a bunch of local models?

Not without lots of money or decent network peering. A 30GB model downloaded a lot of times is a lot of bandwidth.

There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security, storage and infrastructure costs to name a few.

You can't just spin up a VPS and host a brain jar shop.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#85

Post by c0rruptbytes »

gscott wrote: post #80
pphysch wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is among the best positioned if open models win.

Most of nvidia's revenue comes from data center scale out. They will loose their ass if local models win.

open models don’t imply local models… it just allows more people to run them, most likely with nvidia GPUs

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#86

Post by Capricorn2481 »

doublerabbit wrote: post #84
par wrote: post #75

Is it feasible for someone else to just start something almost identical by hosting a bunch of local models?

Not without lots of money or decent network peering. A 30GB model downloaded a lot of times is a lot of bandwidth. There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security, storage and infrastructure costs to name a few. You can't just spin up a VPS and host a brain jar shop.

> There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security...

Well they may have saved some money on one of those

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#88

Post by tantalor »

unethical_ban wrote: post #71
tantalor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effect. Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+

What data can an be extracted from hf though? With GitHub you get a lot of user behavior analysis and can offer enterprise features and see private repositories.

The users are the product.

Re: Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

#89

Post by fennecbutt »

slowin wrote: post #64
willy_k wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.

What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.

Data. Loooads of data for Nvidia. And an audience.
Post reply on HN