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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

#181

Post by hustwindmaple1 »

echelon wrote: post #131
version_five wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

There are times when capital is cheap and abundant and there are times capital is scarce and hard to come by

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

#182

Post by ramesh31 »

CardenB wrote: post #80
ramesh31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer. Network effect. It's more like a GitHub for ML. Also trust. When your business is hosting binaries, that's no small feat.

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…

Docker grew too fast. They chased VC dollars for what really was just a cool open source project. I spent some time at their first office in SF ten years ago for meetups. They had a really cool unique culture. I think that just doesn't scale some times.

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

#183

Post by pyuser583 »

m_ke wrote: post #166
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.

“I didn’t realize you could raise less money.”

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

#184

Post by latentcall »

throw10920 wrote: post #176
claytonjy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Is anti-corporate a bad thing? Is activism also bad? Aren’t all words made up? The word does indeed refer to something. Just because you disagree with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

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

#185

Post by nmfisher »

asadm wrote: post #105
alberth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS has already invested $10B in OpenAI, so they aren’t going to be a buyer. Google has poured hundreds of million into Anthropic due to Eric Schmidt, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are not a replacement for huggingface. Which has complete monopoly on model hosting right now.

Monopoly is a stretch. Half of the models I try come direct from GitHub (and almost 100% of all model code comes from GH too).

Hosting binaries isn't really a stable business model.

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

#186

Post by nmfisher »

steno132 wrote: post #61

Congratulations! 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.

Are you able to provide a bit more detail on what they're doing, or is it still all hush-hush?

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

#187

Post by lostmsu »

jeroenhd wrote: post #130
lsmeducation wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some models are distributed P2P. They download slower, in my experience, and require special software rather than the usual git commands. P2P model distribution isn't impossible, but it's a lot less interesting to many people, or they would've already spread their models through torrents in the first place.

There is just no convenient torrent-based model hub yet.

But if HF's server code is open source it should be trivial to make one.

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

#188

Post by Auracle »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #115
version_five wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sense of why they are HF averse?

I'm not even sure its deliberate. Automatic1111 and ComfyUI implemented the SAI backend/format in the early days because thats all there was , and now they are stuck with it. The intertia is tremendous.

The popular fork of Automatic1111 SD.Next recently implemented diffusers for its SDXL support.

It seems like an odd move to me as what makes Auto1111 so appealing are the extensions and I’m assuming that breaks an awful lot of them, but what do I know?

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

#189

Post by weeblewobble »

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.

Honestly when you put it like that it sounds like a pretty sweet deal. We get a few years of irrationally cheap services for free? I’ll take that.

VC-subsidized Ubers were awesome in my mid 20s. It’s too expensive now for everyday use but I still banked all that consumer surplus.

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

#190

Post by fulladder »

stevofolife wrote: post #148
version_five wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, you typically get all the money wired into your bank account immediately after the deal closes.

It's possible to structure a deal where the company has to reach a series of milestones to unlock each additional tranche of funding, but this is less common.

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