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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

businessinsider.com

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Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#41

Post by andy99 »

riddley wrote: post #14

Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?

I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#42

Post by RachelF »

Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models.

Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.

I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#43

Post by diabllicseagull »

esalman wrote: post #26
bensyverson wrote: post #8

I hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.

As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.

as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#45

Post by dragonwriter »

Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#46

Post by esseph »

sfblah wrote: post #39
rjzzleep wrote: post #21

I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects. But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incent…

Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?

Network effects. It's like a social network for LLM nerds as well as hosting and rating models, etc.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#47

Post by zapzupnz »

sfblah wrote: post #39
rjzzleep wrote: post #21

I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects. But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incent…

Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?

Not just a repo/index but they also offer reasonably-priced compute, with a free tier not to sniff at, on which to run the models.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#48

Post by esseph »

RachelF wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #5

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.

Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

#50

Post by 0gs »

browningstreet wrote: post #17

I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.

Gemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a "scam site" like "mega dot com"
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