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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.
1) What do they want with all that money? 2) How in the world are they going to pay it back? They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.
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.
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 companie…
For example, if you open the home screen on the average smartphone right now, you'll see apps like:
- Delivery apps like Uber, Lyft, etc., whose recommendations, ETA predictions, driver matching, and more are built on ML.
- Media apps like YouTube, Netflix, etc., all of whom rely on models for recommendations.
- Email apps like Gmail, whose filtering (both spam and categorization) and text completion are based on ML.
- Photo apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and even your phone's basic Camera app, all of which use computer vision.
If you Google anything, you're perusing the output of a model. If you're being recommended something on basically any platform, you're interacting with ML. If you ever use speech-to-text, you're using a neural network. Your bank uses ML for fraud detection, your posts on social media are moderated by ML-based content moderation, and if you have a car with any recent-ish sort of lane departure assistance, you're driving with help from a neural network.
Most of these companies have large, mature ML teams, whose outputs represent massive amounts of revenue. Hence, they represent a legitimate market for selling picks and shovels.
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.
B) re: value adds, like what exactly?
C) this seems like such core functionality that a company wouldn’t outsource this to a 3rd party vendor. If that’s the case, there isn’t an opportunity to sell anything if you’re that AL/ML vendor then.
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…
> Its revenue run rate has spiked this year and now sits at around $30 million to $50 million, three sources said — with one noting that it had more that tripled compared to the start of the year.
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…
They will be acquired. Either by Google or MS.
Google has poured hundreds of million into Anthropic due to Eric Schmidt, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.
Edit: dang, guess HN strips out emojis from posts. The Punycode version of the Hugging Face emoji on a relevant TLD supporting emoji domains would be http://xn--zp9h.ml/
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.
Rumor has it Github is actively working on something similar to HF Hub already