Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've said this on HN before, but Nvidia is the one selling shovels IMO.
Everyone has said this
Yeah not exactly a novel hypothesis at this point. People have been saying that since the GPU mining heyday.
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
#1521) 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.
Welcome to VC 101:
1) Grow 2) They don't. It's not a loan. VC world doesn't operate on loans. You go to the bank for that.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#153Genuine 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…
I believe that some of the most valuable short-term use cases for AI/ML seem to be "feature, not a product" - this means that the incumbents making various products can unlock lots of competitive value by adding those features in a way that is difficult for newcomers, because they not only need to develop the AI/ML feature but also have to build a competitive solution for the core system which generates or contains the data on which the feature relies.
Like, it's plausible that many organizations would be willing to pay lots of money for a "ChatGPT which knows my internal documents" AI/ML feature for the Sharepoint/Confluence/etc they are currently using, but a would be very wary of migrating those internal documents to some upcoming startups' new document management system.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#154throwaway 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…
I wouldn't be surprised if they would eventually get acquihired by nVidia. Simply providing all that code and infrastructure to the community is a big boon to raise the value and sales of nVidia hardware; the classic strategy principle - commoditize your complements.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Raise $$$ 3. Spend $$$ 4. Exit w/ $
Take money off the table, that’s what all the startup gurus call it, but whose money is kinda the question. Have pension funds stopped chasing VC funds etc?
The article is quite clear on whose money it is - "Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures".
For at least half of them, it might make sense to simply sponsor accelerating worldwide new AI product development because those new products will increase sales of their hardware and services; pitch in $20m together with others to support efforts like Huggingface, while expecting that their tools will indirectly cause an extra $1b sales for you in the next few years.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#156Hugging face is a terrible name for an ai company. Predicting it suffocating us all both mentally and physically?
I like how companies are embracing branding that evokes cyberpunk and other genres of dystopian science fiction.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#157Congratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative. What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.
Goodness, good luck and congrats!
I am curious however, why name drop Elon and X.ai when asking this question?
With all due respect, I'm not sure how that is going to advance the technical conversation, and in some regards may indeed de-rail it and hinder the mentoring you might receive?
I hope I do not sound combative!
I am generally curious, as I see this behavior at $JOB, but in reverse. "My customer is seeing this." "I have a customer that is asking Y."
I am generally curious on the different perspectives that teammates can come from, that can drive them to take wildly non-congruent approaches, even with similar career experiences.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#158I 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.
Ridiculous. This implies infinite supply. Neither the supply chain, nor nature is designed to churn out GPUs like this. That $ will take time to be captured.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think they're HF averse because HF is fairly anti-NSFW content and it's pretty clear that civit.ai has a fairly large NFSW focused audience.
On top of that HF is just hard to use for your average user. Civit.ai is just "click to download" while HF is "look here's a broken model card... you can figure it out from here".
Despite the cute logo, I think most people find that HF comes across as fairly anti-user. Despite having years doing ML related work, I still find HF a bit byzantine to navigate.
Re: Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
#160Hugging 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.
Maybe? Probably? Probably.
As a counter point, GitHub has remained great for longer than expected, and has arguably improved since being bought by Microsoft.
One can hope that their example will help set the expectation for other platforms like HF