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1) What do they want with all that money? 2) How in the world are they going to pay it back? They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.
It's not a loan, they're selling shares.
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.
Models != apps, they’re closer to the backend for apps or a core library, so your customers aren’t “everyone with a phone/computer” like an app, it’s the much smaller, but potentially high impact, “everyone who creates apps”. We’re not in a world where non tech people are searching for models in the model store from their phone.
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I think their "spaces" (i.e. running tons of models for free with a nice UI) are widely used.
This isn’t sustainable though. Compute is expensive, maybe they’ll end up with paid plans for anyone trying to use a space
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.
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CivitAI has somehow managed this over in Stable Diffusion land. In fact, I think the whole community is HF averse. The two most popular frameworks are based around the Stability implemenetaion and file format, not HF diffusers.
Any sense of why they are HF averse?
Automatic1111 and ComfyUI implemented the SAI backend/format in the early days because thats all there was, and now they are stuck with it. The intertia is tremendous.
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.
"Then collapse" - nope, then generate tens of billions of profit per quarter. Im sure the people of Hugging Face would love that
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Unless the bar gets so big that all the other bars go out of business like with YouTube and many other monopolies/oligopolies.
GitHub is pretty excellent.
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CivitAI has somehow managed this over in Stable Diffusion land. In fact, I think the whole community is HF averse. The two most popular frameworks are based around the Stability implemenetaion and file format, not HF diffusers.
Any sense of why they are HF averse?
Technology-wise, path dependency from stuff that was built out before HF diffusers were available, and on which more continues to be built in the ecosystem.
If you are doing a greenfield project that is mostly standalone, its not an issue, but for existing popular projects and the communities of satellite projects around them, the switching cost is high.
In terms of content hosting, well, a fair amount is hosted on HF, but there is a difference of content focus between CivitAI and HF, and a lot of what CivitAI hosts HF probably wouldn’t want to. Also, CivitAI has a UI focused on the narrow space of imagegen, whereas HF is more general.
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 are: a) a hardware vendor nvidia/amd whose products are needed by anyone in the game b) you have a captive customer base already ( microsoft, salesforce, servicenow, adobe) to whom you can sell ai/ml value adds c) you make money via ads (google facebook) and ai/ml helps with better targeting everyone else is pissing away VC money.