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

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 207 posts

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

#131

Post by echelon »

version_five wrote: post #128
Palmik wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If a ceo said they needed your money 5+ years from now, wouldn't you wait until then to commit?

Why would a CEO give up equity if they don't need the capital? Wouldn't they prefer not to sell big chunks of flesh?

If he's not deploying it now, maybe the CEO is predicting rough times ahead and wants to de-risk for future cash flow or fundraising turbulence? Isn't that, too, a kind of negative signal? Or is this all prudent?

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

#132

Post by basilgohar »

zo1 wrote: post #106
Lord_Zero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, universities would host all that shit via their mirrors for free for everyone. Not sure where it all is today with the cloud being so prevalent.

You don't even hear the term mirror anymore.

Linux distros still have large networks of mirrors for downloading their releases and also packaged binary updates. Maybe we don't "hear" the term but they are still there.

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

#133

Post by CardenB »

hereonout2 wrote: post #126
CardenB wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree, HF is more similar to docker than it is to GitHub

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

#134

Post by esafak »

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.

GitTorrent came and went.

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

#135

Post by esafak »

nkingsy wrote: post #117
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is pretty excellent.

It’s a loss leader so msft can point to something when you complain about the abusive hellscape that is modern windows.

Works for me; I don't really use Windows. Also GitHub is paid so it does not have to be a loss leader.

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

#136

Post by ShamelessC »

ladberg wrote: post #41
taminka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think their "spaces" (i.e. running tons of models for free with a nice UI) are widely used.

Those are pretty lackluster in my experience. Do they even support GPUs? And in any case, it seems like they go down for anything sufficiently popular.

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

#137

Post by ShamelessC »

throwaway644788 wrote: post #86
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.

The whole GTM is confusing. They're experts at ML and community, and awful at business. I know HN looks down on sales persons, but HF needs some good ones, ASAP.

> experts at ML

Citation needed.

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

#138

Post by 1letterunixname »

jedberg wrote: post #40

I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)

Nvidia is likely to have a $36-40 B revenue year this year and next because of massive customer investments. Meta is spending $8 B on their gear and about the same next year. OpenAI+Microsoft are likely following suit with several billion in server buildout. I'm curious if Google or Apple will be adding large swaths of AI boxes to their fleet too.

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

#139

Post by 1letterunixname »

nemo44x wrote: post #35
alberth wrote: post #17

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…

They are selling picks and shovels. There will be a few huge winners in the AI space, a good amount of modest winners, and a lot of losers. They don't care who wins or loses but are happy to sell the supplies needed for anyone that wants to take a shot. If they can make it easier and worthwhile to use their product and create business value, then they will sell a lot of picks and shovels.

Yep. Meta is spending $22 B on CapEx over 2 years without any plan of how to use it, with about half of it tied to buying shit tons of H100 to go in custom servers.

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

#140

Post by mlguy123 »

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...

Notice the choice of words: "Most of our OSS and free usage cost". Who knows what's omitted from that. Also assuming they have zero money left in the bank from the prev round (they def didn't) they're losing/burning $2mm a month
Post reply on HN