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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

#141

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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?

FOMO is a thing among VCs. You may not be let in the round 5 years from now, or the price may be less favorable, etc.

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

#142

Post by claytonjy »

biztos wrote: post #123
asadm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Branding and trust. ML folks love HF, and rightly so. They have great software libraries, host everyone's models, generally great UX all around. They do a great job of making it easy to do cutting edge stuff, while still making it possible to do bleeding edge stuff. They appeal to basically all ML folks in a way few other companies do.

Google could grow GCP by more deeply integrating HF into GCP, I think, while retaining as much of the HF brand and interface as possible.

Big friction point might be ethics, since HF is still seen as the "good guys" and where some folks who left Google over ethical concerns landed.

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

#143

Post by dbish »

thunkshift1 wrote: post #67

Why salesforce?? It seems the want in on everything fancy in the market (looking at slack)

They have a VC arm that just looks for and does investments which doesn’t necessarily means salesforce proper is interested in the tech (though I’m sure there is some of that), kind of like Google Ventures.

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

#144

Post by osanseviero »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #95
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.

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.

FYI the file format, safetensors, was proposed, developed and maintained by HF, and involved people from groups such as Eleuther and Stability for external security audits.

https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors https://huggingface.co/blog/safetensors-security-audit

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

#145

Post by claytonjy »

shmatt wrote: post #116
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.

enshittification is such nonsense. the original article gives Facebook, TikTok, Amazon and other super successful super profitable companies as an example "Then collapse" - nope, then generate tens of billions of profit per quarter. Im sure the people of Hugging Face would love that

"enshittification" doesn't refer to a change in _investor_ value, but to _user_ value. Facebook does make a ton of money, but at the expense of the user experience. They got huge by providing a great UX and making no money; it was the need to make money that triggered enshittification.

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

#146

Post by amelius »

version_five wrote: post #38
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.

They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. I think it's important for people to diversify away from them and not build anything that uniquely depends on them. It's not good to have chokepoints like this.

When it comes to that we'll use AI to migrate everything over :)

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

#147

Post by amelius »

version_five wrote: post #38
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.

They represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. I think it's important for people to diversify away from them and not build anything that uniquely depends on them. It's not good to have chokepoints like this.

It's always the same with these f'ing marketplaces/platforms. There should be new laws for crowdsourced value.

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

#148

Post by stevofolife »

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?

Someone who knows the VC industry should chime in on this - but AFAIK, companies don't get all their money from investor at once.

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

#149

Post by stevofolife »

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. :)

Exactly and it would be extremely stupid for them not to take advantage of their current market position. It's a now or never situation IMO.

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

#150

Post by stevofolife »

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…

To be fair, I don't think there are clear dichotomies in this space. It really has the potential to be a feature or a product in either of the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS industry.

Just do a quick HN search on companies selling AI/ML, you will see what I mean.

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