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- Hacker News
- Potentially 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.
by manlymuppet - I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possibleby make3
- Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?
- We're entering consolidationby DeepYogurt
- Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.by Eji1700
- The Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.by gscott
- > 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.
by rablackburn - True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.by root_axis
- 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).
by abixb - 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.by digitaltrees
- The hyperscalers and OS vendors are doing. Why shouldnt hardware oems.by thunkshift1
- Something something Apple. For what it's worth though, I agree that companies _subsuming_ others to obtain complete vertical market capture has been a very dangerous trend.by mattstir
- This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.by Fervicus
- If you can't beat them, buy them. Hallmark of late-stage capitalism.by unglaublich
- We live in now?
Has always been this way. Big companies always seek to buy fast growing startups and unfortunately the founders of these startups mostly take the money.
by fsuts - We need small companies worldwide, developing the things huggingface does. The us china and Europe dominate while the rest of the world sits by idly. Torrent and seed ai models. It's not piracyby alightsoul
- The 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 with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.
by andy99 - There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.by jacquesm
- We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquiredby zb3
- What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.by Gigachad
- it's literally the GitHub for AIby 0xbadcafebee
- Having an account of practically every software engineer remotely interested in AI....Profitby blackoil
- Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.by andy99
- Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.by dylan604
- If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)by raincole
- Here is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1]
> We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]
I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc.
by ggcr - They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.by dragonwriter
- Soo, what are they buying exactly?
Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln?
I fail to see the point of this. Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form).
Their brand alone surely is not worth this much.
So what are they paying for?
I worry the answer is, for control over who is allowed to distribute the weights. Nothing else.
by Roark66 - Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it might have something to do with OpenAI's model hacking HF thing, especially considering OpenAI is one of Nvidia's most important customers.by mherdelight
- I think they should worth much much more than thisby laxpri