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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I get that concept, but what part of the user is the product at HF? Even openrouter I get because at least it's a broker of all the user's information. HF to me is a glorified file host with no private user data access, no complex user interaction, etc.
It feels like nvidia has money to burn and just wants to make sure they control the portal to open models in case it could benefit them at an unknown point in the future.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
What about when the open models get to the point that you don’t need these fancy GPUs? It seems inevitable this will happen over time, we see cracks right now within even just GPT w/ expert streaming and flash attention. ASICs are coming soon too.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
unddoch | 15 hours ago
hmokiguess | 14 hours ago
oh_no | 14 hours ago
to say nothing of their massive investments direct and indirect in openai
jackb4040 | 14 hours ago
Grombobulous | 12 hours ago
It’s obvious that designers and other content specialists spent multiple days crafting this page.
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
pantalaimon | 11 hours ago
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
LtWorf | 14 hours ago
deaton | 14 hours ago
aslkalska | 14 hours ago
BloodyIron | 13 hours ago
mcintyre1994 | 13 hours ago
aslkalska | 12 hours ago
pixl97 | 9 hours ago
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?
acd10j | 12 hours ago
senshan | 8 hours ago
lode | 15 hours ago
cmiles8 | 14 hours ago
retinaros | 14 hours ago
cmiles8 | 14 hours ago
gk1 | 14 hours ago
tantalor | 13 hours ago
gk1 | 13 hours ago
the__alchemist | 14 hours ago
Bluestein | 13 hours ago
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
7bit | 13 hours ago
retinaros | 14 hours ago
arbuge | 14 hours ago
gk1 | 14 hours ago
abhayaya | 14 hours ago
dfdydx | 13 hours ago
abhayaya | 3 hours ago
iworshipfaangs2 | 14 hours ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kevin-durant-investment-portf...
Grombobulous | 12 hours ago
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.
ishtanbul | 12 hours ago
bdcravens | 10 hours ago
https://www.hustlefund.vc/post/angel-squad-kevin-durant-inve...
While it's true he may not "do the work" and relies on those he's hired, the same is true of the Mark Cubans of the world.
awad | 8 hours ago
Grombobulous | 2 hours ago
I’m not trying to detract from his success or call him stupid, not at all.
But it’s worth pointing out that the only qualification for starting a successful venture firm is having money.
philipwhiuk | 13 hours ago
retinaros | 13 hours ago
tantalor | 13 hours ago
Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+
unethical_ban | 10 hours ago
tantalor | 9 hours ago
unethical_ban | 5 hours ago
It feels like nvidia has money to burn and just wants to make sure they control the portal to open models in case it could benefit them at an unknown point in the future.
trilogic | 13 hours ago
philkuz | 13 hours ago
tomalbrc | 11 hours ago
Oh what did they release?
pixl97 | 9 hours ago
homarp | 8 hours ago
parakeet?
see https://huggingface.co/nvidia for the current list
philkuz | 2 hours ago
barrenko | 12 hours ago
trilogic | 9 hours ago
forestry | 13 hours ago
sealthedeal | 13 hours ago
chews | 13 hours ago
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.
willy_k | 12 hours ago
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.
slowin | 11 hours ago
retinaros | 10 hours ago
fennecbutt | 9 hours ago
slowin | 7 hours ago
dragandj | 10 hours ago
sealthedeal | 12 hours ago
alexpadula | 13 hours ago
sealthedeal | 12 hours ago
irthomasthomas | 10 hours ago
himata4113 | 10 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 12 hours ago
Hugging face emoji = HTML entity 🤗
(https://x.com/calebfahlgren/status/2095516397879152851)
malwrar | 12 hours ago
pphysch | 12 hours ago
gscott | 10 hours ago
c0rruptbytes | 10 hours ago
pixl97 | 9 hours ago
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.
malwrar | an hour ago
ijidak | 9 hours ago
Open models are great for everyone except anthropic and OpenAI.
notatoad | 11 hours ago
liquicity | 11 hours ago
rvz | 10 hours ago
oefrha | 11 hours ago
deweywsu | 11 hours ago
rvz | 10 hours ago
Agreed. Then maybe Nvidia should open source nvcc and CUDA the next software that should be open sourced.
par | 10 hours ago
doublerabbit | 10 hours ago
There's more to than just the website, network bandwidth costs. Security, storage and infrastructure costs to name a few.
You can't just spin up a VPS and host a brain jar shop.
Capricorn2481 | 9 hours ago
Well they may have saved some money on one of those
corysama | 10 hours ago
eitally | 10 hours ago
fennecbutt | 9 hours ago
hmartin | 8 hours ago
https://www.decodingdiscontinuity.com/p/nvidia-hugging-face-...
tldr; Acquisition is an option on Hugging Face becoming the distribution and data-creation infrastructure for open physical AI.
SillyUsername | 10 hours ago
Danox | 10 hours ago
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.
porridgeraisin | 9 hours ago
bionhoward | 9 hours ago
Psillisp | 8 hours ago
Not A Bubble
Not A Bubble
Not A Bubble
Not A Bubble
Not A Bubble