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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

#171

Post by dharmab »

jeroenhd wrote: post #51
htrp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really? As far as I can tell, diffusers/transformer are open sourced wrappers around torch implementations, there are a bunch of companies that are offering inference (just like they are), and there is some value in offering S3 storage to allow for model search. If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"

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.

Is that so different than some free to play video games? Those are sometimes hundreds of GB and downloaded by millions.

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

#172

Post by Melting_Harps »

hereonout2 wrote: post #109
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've been asking myself that for a while. Would they be so popular if they didn't host & serve petabytes of model files for free? How will they monetize that aspect to match this valuation? Whilst the scale of their model hosting is impressive, the functionality seems pretty basic. The models are just BLOBs in git LFS repos, you're usually relying on knowing which users to follow, then learning the way they name thei…

> I've been asking myself that for a while. Would they be so popular if they didn't host & serve petabytes of model files for free? How will they monetize that aspect to match this valuation?

From what I gather it's mainly hosting with some maintaining of a few libraries, but then I recently starting to see they are offering lots of classes via DeepLearning platform; these lat couple of months as an AI student I've been asked to enroll into classes (temporarily for free) to assess where they are, here is the most recent example [0].

To what end, I'm not entirely sure, but I guess it's to get an overall pulse on what can be monetized and take it from there? I really think that this a low number compraed to where we were in the last few years, but ti also shows how little investment actually exists in the AI and ML space: consider that Git got bought by M$ for 7.5B and then tried cash in on it by releasing Co-Pilot and then got into legal issues as a result and then tried it's hand with Open AI and $10B.

This is starting to seem like a reversion to the mean, and AI's promise was always to lower the cost to everything it can, but I think one of the harder pills to swallow is that the traditional VC model is not really being supported after all the hype and losses.

Personally speaking, I'm thinking of moving on to Cyber Security after my finals this semester; I come from Bitcoin and the hype cycles there are something I was looking to get away from after nearly 13 years in that side of fintech.

0: https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/

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

#173

Post by mistrial9 »

iambateman wrote: post #160
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.

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

what you do not know can hurt you ... behind closed doors they have added the equivalent of Airport Security on users, repos and access. Expect a profit center of maintaining your valid ID so you can start work each day.

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

#174

Post by jtsiskin »

mmaunder wrote: post #83
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. :)

Interesting situation with public markets funding Nvidia which is investing in its own customers, driving further strong financial results driving further public investment. A high risk high reward play. Nvidia is eating AI.

Humorously(?), you’re also exactly describing a pyramid scheme

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

#175

Post by jtsiskin »

sleepybrett wrote: post #54

Hugging face is a terrible name for an ai company. Predicting it suffocating us all both mentally and physically?

It’s named after the emoji; started as a chat app for teens: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-beco...

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

#176

Post by throw10920 »

claytonjy wrote: post #145
shmatt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "enshittification" doesn't refer to a change in _investor_ value

"enshittification" doesn't refer to anything at all. It's a political term meant to be used by anti-corporate causes - it doesn't have a real definition because it's a made-up word with no value other than activism.

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

#177

Post by coffeebeqn »

dharmab wrote: post #171
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.

Is that so different than some free to play video games? Those are sometimes hundreds of GB and downloaded by millions.

They come with a finely tuned monetization system built in and are very profitable

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

#178

Post by coffeebeqn »

pradn wrote: post #85
bakuninsbart wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.

Late in the "enshittification cycle", competitors do rise, but they're usually under-resourced. So you get a overly-monetized primary product and a bunch of "never quite there" competitors. That's overall worse than at the primary product's "free beer" phase.

The most likely successful entrants I can imagine are big tech. They’ll either build or buy the best competitor. And they all already have data centers ready to go

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

#179

Post by coffeebeqn »

foooorsyth wrote: post #97
bakuninsbart wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.

>there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering There are network effects in play here. They have a big moat purely because of their large user base.

Similar to GitHub which I imagine they want to emulate. Sure there are other public code repositories but most people find GitHub good enough to not bother looking at options

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

#180

Post by coffeebeqn »

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.

Is it really? It’s the “SaaS” all startups I’ve seen seem happy to pay for.
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