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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

#161

Post by SkyMarshal »

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.

It seems the enshittification cycle may have resulted at least in part from the Blitzscaling methodology [1]. Are there any studies on the effectiveness of Blitzscaling in general? I wonder if it's a net success or not.

[1]:https://www.blitzscaling.com/

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

#162

Post by outside1234 »

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.

We call them CDNs now :)

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

#163

Post by MasterScrat »

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. :)

> They know that money is coming right back to them.

Oh I assumed they were directly delivering them truckful of A100s? do they actually still bother with cash? ;-)

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

#164

Post by m_ke »

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?

MS makes sense since they could integrate it with github and azure into an ML platform that they could sell to their enterprise consumer base. It would also be a great addition to teams, bing and word suite.

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

#165

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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?

Currently 10 years of runway. I wouldn't expect them to maintain that for a significant period of time.

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

#166

Post by m_ke »

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…

Yeah that was my concern as well. I used to work for an AI company that ended up in the same predicament, they raised way too much money at a high valuation and in the process cut down the potential acquirer pool to 3-4 companies. They are now a zombie with worthless common shares, no shot at an acquisition and nowhere near enough revenue to go public.

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

#167

Post by vl »

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 I use HF to get some base model I always make sure I have local copy and then load from the local copy. I push said copy into (remote, obviously) git for the eventuality of HF going down/model being removed.

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

#168

Post by bpiche »

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.

Spacy hosts them too, of course.

python -m spacy download en-core-web-lg

etc

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

#169

Post by nemo44x »

alberth wrote: post #96
nemo44x wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Picks and shovels are tools. But what “tools” are being sold for AI/ML? - A model isn’t a tool, that’s a purpose built offering that can be used for 1 use case. Tools are by definition, intended to help with broad/general use cases. - Hosting isn’t a tool, it’s a commodity and lots of cloud players already occupy that space. Please don’t take my comments as trolling, I just geninuely don’t understand what exactly is…

They have a suite of software you can use to power your own software. These are tools and no different than what database vendors, etc in terms of being software you use to build software. In addition there’s support and services.

I imagine they have big plans on how to expand and grow the business.

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

#170

Post by extraduder_ire »

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. :)

"Can we have the investment partly in stock?" "I guess, but our shareholders probably won't be too happy." "No no no, not shares. I mean stock like from a warehouse, we need them cores man!"
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