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Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

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

#931
post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried for a while to push internally and amongst a few of the markets to move to ISIN, Currency, MIC but yeah…anything but that. Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win…

I think ISINs being used in Europe might even predate the EU taking charge of a lot of financial market regulation. Probably they became more popular/important specifically because tickers did not, which in turn is probably because there are so many countries/exchanges that a global exchange-driven namespace was never really feasible?

Well, listings had domestic regulator control for the most part but I think you hit it on the head. Brokers in Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, or Milan needed to access 15-20 countries worth of exchanges, and the curse in the EU is the multi-currency cross listings.

Easier, if somewhat more verbose, to use the three in combo to identify. Helped somewhat by the message volumes being a small fraction of what they are in the US. Less need to optimize on a per order, or per market data packet basis.

Also explains why FIX is more prevalent in EU markets than it is in the US.

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

#932
post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t disagree there, though this has been status quo for nearly two decades now. By that measure regional exchanges were their own beasts for a long time. The environment has definitely streamlined a ton since RegNMS was implemented and the exchanges consolidated a bit. Even the technology stacks the current markets run are basically identical within three families of design (even the upstart markets, and even those…

Agreed. Even LTSE is just running the MEMX stack.

Shit, MIAX is just the old BATS/Cboe technology with some local flair. There are multiple derivatives of the old Island/INET tech stack, mainly in ATSs, but the iteration Nasdaq is operating on only diverges where extreme message volume factors in.

No one is silly enough to want the abomination of design that is Pillar, but the point still stands that technical differentiation isn’t really important in the way it was 15-20yr ago.

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

#933
post #248
post #82

Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain. Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.

If the acquisitions of late tell us anything at all, it's that Nvidia wants to be a vertical AI company, not a hardware or gaming company.

There's a small chance this could be signalling a pivot, or at least posturing for a possible future pivot. If they see the mega-datacenter market drying up or slowing down, they may opt for a future in hardware targeted to the individual or smaller teams. In other words, as soon as the VC money for centralized AI dries up, they start selling hardware that doesn't require VC-levels of money to buy.

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

#934
post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translating CUDA kernels to ROCm (or any other ecosystem, tbh) is going to become trivially easy with AI. Not saying that code is the only glue that Nvidia has when it comes to their ecosystem, but it’s certainly a large part of it.

It's not that difficult at the moment. Don't know why you would need an LLM to translate between two nearly identical language extensions. Optimization is different, but that's not really a translation level task.

If an LLM can do a rote task for me, I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it

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

#935
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…

> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown. There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent. No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's s…

No mention to Mistral?

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

#936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the spending and valuations in the AI space being so reasonable and grounded in reality, sure. Huggingface will surely be exactly like GitHub and Instagram with their extremely low and stable per-user overhead, and large, extremely dedicated user bases.

I just feel like you're saying things based on a general vibe about "AI companies" but didn't pause to look up the particular company being discussed. Huggingface reached profitability 2 years ago. They've reportedly just started to touch the cash they raised 3 years ago. They have a tiered pricing model with metered pricing on resource heavy services. Seems pretty stable? Your point about their user base is even wei…

You’re right. I didn’t really dig into huggingface specifically even though they’re obviously different from the examples I used in my mental model. I’m not going to say I’m wrong because I haven’t personally looked into it, and regardless of HF’s position in it, this industry regularly squeezes out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano. That said, I was clearly speaking glibly using likely flawed references.

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

#937
post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "People" a lot in your post. Corporations are not "people". Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates. Corporations can lobby , as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute. They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to la…

I don't understand what you're getting at. If it's okay for Corporations can run ads themselves, then your objection isn't to wealthy people supporting candidates or even them doing so secretly, but... only when the little guy pools donations and they happen to be pool donations via a corporation?

I'm against anything secret about spending on political campaigns.

Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.

PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.

Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.

In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.

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

#938
post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers (and bean counters) call it 'goodwill'. One word.

Accounting goodwill might be one term, but it has multiple components (trust, reputation, market share, mindshare, track record, relationships, online and offline community presence, etc. etc.)

I only meant the artful term is 'goodwill' and not 'good will'.

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

#940
post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is promoting "unmetered intelligence". Jensen wants everyone to have a spark dgx with an nvidia chip in their home.

Wasn’t Huang the guy who said your $500K employee should burn at least half his salary on tokens? I don’t think Nvidia is focused on cost-effective general computing for anybody.

It is possible to serve different markets with different agendas and have both of them serve nVidia’s business. Think of all the freemium software out there; widespread so everybody can use it, but the people who REALLY use it REALLY pay up.
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