81–90 of 207 posts
Added to the fact that of they get too dominant they'll get leveraged out of the supply chain and I'm not sure what the value proposition is here.
I mean obviously I'll be wrong but it's hard to not be skeptical
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…
I can't for the life of me understand the strategy that Clem and team have, other than raise as much money as possible just because they can. My experience with their sales teams was just absolutely awful, and it gave me no hope that they can grow ARR as soon as they need to. We practically begged them to sell us something, but it wasn't until we went elsewhere definitively that they seemed interested.
I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)
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.
Careful not to become dependent on the free beer.
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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.
You can replace this with "container" and "docker", and it turned out exactly or similar to how you predict. However, there is nothing with a big moat that Huggingface is offering. If they overeshittify, competitors will rise up.
Confusing Pricing. https://huggingface.co/pricing I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.
I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)
it is totally can be condition of investment round: have specific vendor as compute provider.
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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…
It's important to note that despite the recent excitement about LLMs, which is still an emerging technology, "AI" is not a new market by any means, nor are major companies only now investing in it. For the better part of a decade, ML has been widely adopted across industries, and the average person uses an "AI" system many times in a given day. For example, if you open the home screen on the average smartphone right…
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.
It'll go the same route as Docker. Anyone relying on it for critical software will pay, everyone else will use alternative but compatible sources once it's no longer free.
What Docker ended up accelerating at is reproducible development environments that tear down and spin up easily. I think this is the largest faction of docker users.
It never translated into a high volume of Docker Swarm and related sell through features materializing though.
That's what a swath of all their new paid features are focused on enterprise things like SSO, auditing etc.
For Hugging Face, they will need to have a compelling set of features that make it either hard to migrate off of or vastly preferable to other options the majority of the time.
Right now, their most compelling feature is being (mostly) free