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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

#121

Post by dbish »

fidotron wrote: post #112
dbish wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are already in a world where “artists” are exchanging models online based on their ability to generate certain outputs.

Do you put artists in quotes for anyone who uses a computer for their art at all? Are photographers artists in your opinion?

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

#122

Post by dbish »

jsemrau wrote: post #113
dbish wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t sustainable though. Compute is expensive, maybe they’ll end up with paid plans for anyone trying to use a space

That should be inversely related to their usage though. I am using HF frequently, but I am not sure if I would pay for it.

That is the issue for sure

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

#123

Post by biztos »

asadm wrote: post #60
mlguy123 wrote: post #56

throwaway since since i used to be affiliated with them. HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships…

They will be acquired. Either by Google or MS.

Why Google (who has their own AI stuff) or MS (who has a hand in OpenAI) and not, say, Samsung?

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

#124

Post by fidotron »

dbish wrote: post #121
fidotron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already in a world where “artists” are exchanging models online based on their ability to generate certain outputs.

Do you put artists in quotes for anyone who uses a computer for their art at all? Are photographers artists in your opinion?

Because of what many of the most popular models are actually for.

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

#125

Post by myth_drannon »

taminka wrote: post #33
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.

i'm curious what HF does, because iiuc they're mostly just hosting model files? i know that they have some compute offers, and also created/maintain a few libraries, but it's not particularly widely used, i'm really not sure how they're supposed to earn money...

It is also used for discovery and search of models. Following your train of thought, Github is just hosting a bunch of src files.

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

#126

Post by hereonout2 »

CardenB wrote: post #80
ramesh31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What do people think separated GitHub from docker? Docker also had DockerHub, but it wasn’t as necessary as GitHub and didn’t catch on as well. I think HF is more like docker than GitHub. GitHub had the wide scope to be huge. Docker was too niche (in comparison) and didn’t catch on so much to be necessary for every single project like Git did. Similarly, HF is also niche in the sense that docker is. There’s no need t…

Dockerhub is great for sharing images with the world at large, much like HF is for models. But once you're at the point where you want to host your images / models for business use do you really still want them?

All cloud providers seem to have an image hosting feature, why go through hassle of managing and paying for a docker hub account when you're already on AWS and can integrate better with ECR? The same problem exists for ML model hosting IMO.

Github is totally different, it's a more complex and human proposition. For many github has replaced an entire raft of tools, not just code hosting.

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

#127

Post by kordlessagain »

frozencell wrote: post #72
stagger87 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this on HN before, but Nvidia is the one selling shovels IMO.

IMO HF sell tents and Nvidia sell shovels

HF feels more like mules than tents to me.

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

#128

Post by version_five »

Palmik wrote: post #114
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.

According to Clement (the HF CEO) they are close to covering their costs, and have 10years runway: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue/status/16947653579682861...

Can someone who knows the VC industry explain why having 10 years runway would be considered good? Aren't these companies supposed to be deploying capital as quickly as possible, not banking it. If a ceo said they needed your money 5+ years from now, wouldn't you wait until then to commit?

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

#129

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

michaelt wrote: post #73
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diversify to what, though? The economics of hosting models and datasets seem to just not be great in general. For the same reasons that we can expect HF to eventually crack down on the "freeloaders", I think pretty much any other entity also will unless it's explicitly set up as a public benefit. I could see this sort of thing maybe being funded by universities or their affiliated foundations, but most companies with…

Pip, maven, npm, docker hub, apt-get, github and suchlike seem to manage to provide hefty binary downloads with no need to monetise anonymous downloads. I don't quite understand how they do so, but it seems to be possible. Everyone who downloads a 5GB stable diffusion model probably downloaded 5GB of pytorch+cuda+cudnn first.

For its part, PyPI is apparently funded by the Python Software Foundation and run by volunteer admins, with the bulk of its data served gratis by Fastly. This is based on a blog post about its infrastructure from 2021 [1], which also says that the list price for the throughput they're doing is $1.8 million per month.

[1] https://dustingram.com/articles/2021/04/14/powering-the-pyth...

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

#130

Post by jeroenhd »

lsmeducation wrote: post #78
jeroenhd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their Git LFS based hosting is used by a lot of AI tools. Huggingface level data storage and transfer would also be VERY costly to accomplish for a small party. Some of these models are several gigabytes in size and downloaded hundreds or thousands of time per day. What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.

Lol, I’m sorry what? Has anyone heard of BitTorrent or piracy in general? You’re telling me AI models/data are too big? Someone utilize p2p for the love of god. Pretty sure there’s gigabytes of porn moving (freely) through the internet millions of times per day.

Some models are distributed P2P. They download slower, in my experience, and require special software rather than the usual git commands.

P2P model distribution isn't impossible, but it's a lot less interesting to many people, or they would've already spread their models through torrents in the first place.

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