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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

#41

Post by ladberg »

taminka wrote: post #33
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.

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 think their "spaces" (i.e. running tons of models for free with a nice UI) are widely used.

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#44

Post by emmender1 »

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…

you are:

a) a hardware vendor nvidia/amd whose products are needed by anyone in the game

b) you have a captive customer base already ( microsoft, salesforce, servicenow, adobe) to whom you can sell ai/ml value adds

c) you make money via ads (google facebook) and ai/ml helps with better targeting

everyone else is pissing away VC money.

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

#45

Post by version_five »

nemo44x wrote: post #35
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…

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.

I agree and so far I think it's picks and shovels all the way down. Most of the "AI" companies I see sell tooling, often to "help your AI team work faster|better|spend less time doing x|whatever. It all presupposes there are end uses, which are few and far between, certainly almost none are being sold. AI is still in the hype mode of companies having internal budget to "invest in AI" and so that's who the AI companies are targeting, as opposed to actually making products that do something. See also blockchain wallet companies.

PS - I'm optimistic about AI, but it's important to be realistic about the current state of the industry

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

#46

Post by traveler1 »

tilne wrote: post #25
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…

Aren’t you in all of those? The further you keep the user away from training and hosting, the less you’re in those businesses. But I would think it’s only economical to do that if you have some type of advantage in implementing the things you’re abstracting away.

I think the opposite may be true. If you control the training and hosting, surely that means you have to be more involved in many industries to make the product useful? Whereas with offloading training/tuning to the user, you kinda just become PaaS, in that you provide a platform which enables others.

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

#47

Post by mistrial9 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #27

Really, throughout the entire funding process no one raised the similarity of "Hugging Face" to "Face-huggers", the larval name for the Xenomorphs from Alien ?

except that it is literally named for a friendly and non-offensive chat signal.

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

#48

Post by htrp »

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.

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"

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

#50

Post by htrp »

emmender1 wrote: post #44
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…

you are: a) a hardware vendor nvidia/amd whose products are needed by anyone in the game b) you have a captive customer base already ( microsoft, salesforce, servicenow, adobe) to whom you can sell ai/ml value adds c) you make money via ads (google facebook) and ai/ml helps with better targeting everyone else is pissing away VC money.

> a) a hardware vendor nvidia whose products are needed by anyone in the game

FTFY.... I don't think AMD will be competitive in AI until at least 2025, though given their broken roadmap promises, not sure if anyone will be willing to invest in them

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