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Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

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Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#11

Post by JumpCrisscross »

immortal3 wrote: post #3
warthog wrote: post #2

It is crazy to me that it is still 100x the ARR at this stage. I think for Deel, it as around 12x

To add further, i do not know what is end goal of hugging face. 1. They have inference API but all cloud provider can implement those in next year. 2. They offer subscription but market-size of subscription is questionable. 3. I hope this new set of funding don't bring problem to them because making money with open source is hard and at this scale of funding it might be even harder. It see what happens in next set of…

GitHub for ML models? If they can anchor themselves to the open-source developer network, their acquisition value is in a tech giant being able to cross-sell to that community.

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#12

Post by fidotron »

ML models are the new apps. There is a huge opening for an App Store type situation which enables people to buy models and integrate them into their products, handling the appropriate licensing.

Bonus points for certifying the models actually do what they say. That by itself will probably become a mini industry.

Hugging Face are the clear leaders in terms of having mindshare in the community to be able to build it.

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#15

Post by ramesh31 »

kiratp wrote: post #14

I love Huggingface. I worry they will be the next Docker. What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.

>What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.

Network effect. It's more like a GitHub for ML.

Also trust. When your business is hosting binaries, that's no small feat.

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#16

Post by QuadrupleA »

Hugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse.

Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace?

Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#17

Post by alberth »

Genuine question … What business are you in when selling AI/ML?

I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”.

And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML?

Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell?

To use an analogy, if you’re selling AI/ML, are you in the IaaS industry, PaaS industry, SaaS industry (or something else?)

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#18

Post by ulrikhansen54 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #15
kiratp wrote: post #14

I love Huggingface. I worry they will be the next Docker. What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.

>What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer. Network effect. It's more like a GitHub for ML. Also trust. When your business is hosting binaries, that's no small feat.

They also have an insane amount of traffic - very envious, they'll be able to capitalise on other things as soon as they start to build commercial products people are willing to pay big money for.

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#19

Post by espadrine »

alberth wrote: post #13

Confusing Pricing. https://huggingface.co/pricing I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.

They are covering a range of use-cases. I agree the naming is inconsistent. It goes like this:

• Repository storage is free, with a paid enterprise offering, à la GitHub.

• Serving a demo app has hourly costs (“Spaces Hardware”)

• Serving a production model for an app hosted elsewhere is also hourly (“Inference endpoints”)

• Training models is free for now (“AutoTrain”; honestly I haven’t tried this one.)

Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

#20

Post by NelsonMinar »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #16

Hugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse. Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace? Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.

Yeah, enjoy the free beer and have a plan to take a case with you when the bar is closing.
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