These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature on the founders/board.
Overheard: "It would be a shame if Hugging Face had to press charges for hacking against your best customer. Perhaps if I was busy counting my money, it might slip my mind."
I don’t think many realize how hard it is to raise for a no revenue company that isn’t buying out large GPU contracts and racking machines.
They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations.
To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.
Agreed. Take a ~$13bn buyout im sure cash and stock is the smartest thing to do for a company their size and age. Take the profits now and keep building securely. I imagine their employees very much gotten taken care of. Jensen mentioned an additional $1bn in cash compensation etc to keep employees at HF.
> To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely
At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.
I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.
I don't think they have much data, they host the (open) models but I don't think they're getting any logs from users or anything like that. I don't believe they monetize data either. I also suspect Nvidia has a much larger audience than Hugging Face.
I watched their CNBC interview this morning with Hugging Face CEO and Jensen. HF CEO specifically said they went to Jensen and said they wanted to join forces. Obviously more elegant lol.
Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.
My understanding of Hugging Face is limited to "File Host with Model Cards". Can someone with more understanding explain what the $12 billion value comes from?
Feels like acquiring Docker Hub (just the hub, not even Docker Inc that controls Docker the software) in ~2018. AI craze valuations are truly out there.
Is the fact that Nvidia is also massively financing the closed-models companies, which stand to lose when open model project(s) take off, a conflict of interest here? I can’t tell if this is nvidia hedging or planning to embrace & extinguish.
Any model ran takes compute. Everybody, datacenters and local need compute.
And I don't see a future where datacenters lose much to open models. I've ran local server rooms before clouds were a thing. Cooling and power is a very expensive pain in the ass. You're not dropping a rack of local models in most buildings without breaking the local power grid.
AWS and Azure would love to cut out OpenAI and Anthropic and sell inference on open models directly to businesses with no cut to share, just as AWS serves other open source software.
Open models are great for everyone except anthropic and OpenAI.
Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.
I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market
There is a particular problem with this view. Yes, you learn how many lawsuits occur per year, but you are clueless on the base rate of actions that could potentially lead to lawsuits.
Is it a 1:10 ration, 1:1000, 1:100000?
You just don't know because companies don't tell you this information. If for example there were a magic oracle that forced every suitable action into a suit, would the entire legal system of the US instantly explode?
Let’s not forget to give credit to his family office. High net worth individuals don’t just personally do things like make investments themselves. They hire experts to do that.
Sure, at some point Kevin Durant made the high-level decision that he wanted to invest in high-growth startup companies. But there’s a very low chance that he’s working the day-to-day of that process.
I’d put it close to zero. He was likely presented with the deal once it was sourced and reviewed by his investment team, who likely did 100% of the work. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make the final decision, but pro athletes dont have time to do much investing work beyond high level networking and approving deals.
Durant is more than just an athlete who gets suggestions from those who handle his investments; he co-founded a venture firm ten years ago that has invested in over 100 companies.
Huggingface, llama.cpp and all European frontier. Congrats to Huggingface Team, that amount is tempting but nowhere near your real evaluation. You were about to blow up and there is no AI bubble (just not enough infrastructure like energy and hardware to process current and exponential inevitable growing tokens). Huggingface is bringing the real value to AI community, all the rest is more like scalping IMHO. Nvidia is a great company but not opensource friendly by historical doings. Today is a sad day for the community. Put a timer 2 year from now and mark this words: Huggingface is the free foundation, get what you can today.
Outdated take. Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips. Keeping the backbone of Oss model delivery afloat seems like it would sell more chips.
Openrouter and huggingface both sold to multi billion dollar entities in the same few weeks - perhaps this is great for the founders, but as a consumer I hate this acquisition loop that happens with every company of adequate size these days.
The goal of the deal is to speed up open source according to Nvidia what a laugh ha ha ha …
Where is the EU in all this? Is this not similar to letting another European tech company disappear from Europe ie.. Arms Holding which was sold to the Japanese, how do you compete going into the future in the tech world if you let European companies be bought out by foreign companies. Declaring them gatekeepers down the road and issuing a fine will never make you a tech powerhouse.
Is this just another symptom of the EU being run by politicians and lawyers who don’t seem to grasp/understand tech.
What data can an be extracted from hf though? With GitHub you get a lot of user behavior analysis and can offer enterprise features and see private repositories.
Its a s3 wrapper. Can be replaced by a wordpress with torrents too. But they built an ecosystem around it and some libs/content. i guess thats what nvidia value
Regardless if this would qualify, anti-trust is dead in the US. Alphabet and Meta, for example, would have been broken up years ago if we still had anti-trust enforcement.
One big issue actually is that HF has the llama.cpp team, which is (was?) arguably the biggest threat to Nvidia's dominance through it's closed CUDA software.
Hugging Face has no path to substantial profitability and the investors and employees want liquidity. Nvidia doesn't want this to look like a bubble pop (as they have lots of GPU data center build outs to complete), they've got plenty of cash on hand, and they're an extremely good natural fit for the company.
Nvidia is seeing its top frontier model customers develop their own chips to sidestep Nvidia and as a counter, Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem. Open source means more competition and more demand for GPUs rather than single all-powerful labs that can will their own chips into existence and begin to push Nvidia aside. Plus Nvidia is betting big on local inference for robotics. All of this is bolstered by open source.
It's not like you can't just post model weights anywhere. There's really no lock in that Hugging Face has.
If you're looking for real monopoly issues that distort market economics and make it hard to compete without paying taxes to your competitor, consider Google's ownership of 92% of URL bars or the Google / Apple duopoly of smart phone software distribution.
> Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem
Wasn't always the case and will probably only be as long as there is a self interest.
> Linus Torvalds himself noted that the AI boom changed NVIDIA, turning them into a much better contributor to the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds: AI CHANGED NVIDIA.
It generally was always the case. Nvidia was a huge stakeholder in technologies like OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan, supporting Khronos' goal to further expand the FOSS API ecosystem.
Linus is probably referring to Nvidia's "open" driver series and capitulation on EGLStream. Nvidia got a terrible reputation for refusing to implement GBM for Wayland desktops, insisting on the nonstandard EGLStream protocol for close to a decade. Around 2024 (550-series drivers) they gave up and reworked their drivers for GBM-agnostic usage, fixing Wayland and generally resolving the biggest gripe people had against Nvidia hardware.
