What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?
The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?
The public
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
61–70 of 952 posts
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#62Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#63Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits. That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health. I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep. Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#64What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#65What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
[deleted]
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#66[deleted]
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health. I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep. Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#68The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers. I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align…
We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#69What 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.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
Re: Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
#70Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits. That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.