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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

#881

Post by aseipp »

DrewADesign wrote: post #873
calebkaiser wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why?

Why I don’t think it’s sustainable to run a compute-intensive business on low monthly plans? If they’re like OpenAI and Anthropic, monthly plan users can spend many times the amount of money in a month than they pay, and unlike regular lower-compute SaaS businesses, overhead increases significantly with usage. That means the more users many of these services get, the more money they lose. Some surmise OpenAI was hidi…

Most of HF's revenue comes from their enterprise customers; you essentially get direct access to their MLEs (Slack) as well as their software stack, hence the per-seat cost and annual minimum contract price. In that sense they are not particularly "compute-heavy" in terms of what they "really" sell.

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

#882

Post by dang »

costco wrote: post #741
dang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that's not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you're thinking, other people do the same, and then we get "Laws are for poor people" and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgui…

This is the last time I will engage in self promotion for a while but the above comment and some of its replies are a perfect demonstration of my latest guidelines violations project… https://classify.stylometry.net/violations/49458425?threshol...

I'm sorry I haven't responded to your email yet! It's in the queue...

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

#883

Post by shric »

SideQuark wrote: post #494
shric wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sold you on GitHub Actions? The one 9 of reliability? https://www.githubstatus.com/

Not sure what you’re intending to show. That page shows 99.5%+ uptime across all 11 of the services provided. To do that at a small company world cost significant money. To have it integrated and cheap for all those small shops is very valuable to them.

It shows 98.3% for actions for me

https://ibb.co/PsMkpJFY

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

#884

Post by thunkshift1 »

digitaltrees wrote: post #652

This trend to vertical integration is very dangerous. We should not allow the people making tech to control the whole pipeline unless we want a permanent underclass.

The hyperscalers and OS vendors are doing. Why shouldnt hardware oems.

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

#885

Post by aniceperson »

Whitespace wrote: post #698
penciltwirler wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hugging Face's internal storage system is more sophisticated now after they acquired XetHub. They have a clever way to chunk and content dedupe the data that makes it a lot more efficient to version control large files.

Xet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0] But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS. So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition a…

git lfs just dumps your bin on s3, and is abandonoware since ms bought github, since github historically hosts on aws s3 and improving it would immediately benefit amazon. gh, the maintainers of it, is the only forge that does not allow clean-up unreachable artifact from the server.

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

#886

Post by ToucanLoucan »

dragandj wrote: post #798
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the top end goal is to allow capital to access skill without allowing skill to access capital. IF they can make these products work as advertised (big if, very very big if) the corpos can fire shitloads of low-end workers and give their middle managers access to these AI models and nothing else really has to change. Workers lose their ability to earn a living, but OpenAI and Anthropic become the gatekeepers to ef…

Who (what) would all these middle managers manage? Agents? Why? If agents were so capable, they'd sure be capable of managing themselves or each other...

I mean I did word that carefully, "as much of the workforce as possible." So yes entirely possible that the middle managers get automated out too.

I genuinely don't get what the endgame here is, just AI's talking to AI's everywhere and somehow they think everything just keeps on making money I guess? But then again our current crop of oligarchs are pretty mediocre all around, so calling any of this a "plan" at all feels a stretch. Just cut costs every quarter, make the products worse, fire everyone who knows anything and sail off into the sunset making more money than any human being can actually spend in the process.

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

#887

Post by fantispug »

codemog wrote: post #577
armcat wrote: post #551

HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes through). Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. On the positive note, the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new fro…

> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation. Their BLOOM model was a joke and…

Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier.

When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment.

BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software.

Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right.

I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.

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

#888

Post by DrewADesign »

aseipp wrote: post #881
DrewADesign wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why I don’t think it’s sustainable to run a compute-intensive business on low monthly plans? If they’re like OpenAI and Anthropic, monthly plan users can spend many times the amount of money in a month than they pay, and unlike regular lower-compute SaaS businesses, overhead increases significantly with usage. That means the more users many of these services get, the more money they lose. Some surmise OpenAI was hidi…

Most of HF's revenue comes from their enterprise customers; you essentially get direct access to their MLEs (Slack) as well as their software stack, hence the per-seat cost and annual minimum contract price. In that sense they are not particularly "compute-heavy" in terms of what they "really" sell.

Ah so it sounds like they might be closer to a regular SaaS.

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

#889

Post by DrewADesign »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #121
DrewADesign wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times. –Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.

This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.

Yeah the people that say things like this aren’t looking for valuable companies, or to create value, or for sustainability — they’re looking for short-term growth.

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

#890

Post by abrookewood »

aesthesia wrote: post #770
abrookewood wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why?

This is like asking who is paying for GitHub if you can clone repositories and download code from it for free.

I guess that's a decent analogy, except the vast majority of people aren't building their own models.
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