Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face(blogs.nvidia.com)
96 pointsby tosh2 hours ago13 comments
  • cmiles8an hour ago
    Not sure why this is news again this week when it was already announced previously. NYTimes was also reporting this like it was news today.
    • 7bit32 minutes ago
      Because it's a new blog post with new information
    • retinarosan hour ago
      Wasn’t official
      • the__alchemistan hour ago
        In related news, Voyager has left the solar system!
      • cmiles8an hour ago
        Sure, but that’s the case for basically all acquisitions.
        • gk1an hour ago
          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.
  • lode2 hours ago
    Discussed last week at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458161
  • gk1an hour ago
    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.
    • abhayayaan hour ago
      Hugging Face has an identity problem. It needs a gestalt therapist to take it back to where it was meant to grow up.
  • trilogic14 minutes ago
    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.
  • arbugean hour ago
    They approached Nvidia to start the conversation. I guess sometimes great companies are sold, not just bought.
  • forestry8 minutes ago
    Dupe.
  • unddoch2 hours ago
    Theoretically, can Nvidia direct Hugging Face to sue OpenAI now for the hack? Surely they could find some interesting stuff in discovery :)
    • hmokiguessan hour ago
      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
      • oh_noan hour ago
        the last thing nvidia would want is to make ai look more legally risky

        to say nothing of their massive investments direct and indirect in openai

        • jackb4040an hour ago
          Yep. In fact, eliminating that risk on OpenAI's behalf was probably a small factor in the acquisition
    • aslkalska43 minutes ago
      why would they sue their client ?! what does that say to all their other clients ?
      • BloodyIron31 minutes ago
        Clients sue other business partners all the time, that doesn't mean they stop working together. There's lots of examples of this.
        • mcintyre199419 minutes ago
          I suspect there are very few examples of it when they are as entangled and invested in them as Nvidia is in OpenAI.
    • LtWorfan hour ago
      Why would they sue one of their most important customers?
      • 44 minutes ago
        undefined
      • deatonan hour ago
        Not to mention that they own a 10% stake in OpenAI
  • iworshipfaangs2an hour ago
    Another investing W for Kevin Durant, who is likely producing better returns than most VCs while being a full-time athlete.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kevin-durant-investment-portf...

  • retinarosan hour ago
    Life changing for engineers having joined a few year ago. Congrats
  • an hour ago
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  • philipwhiuk18 minutes ago
    I don't really understand why the AI equivalent of Maven Central is worth 12.9 billion dollars but maybe I'm an idiot.
    • tantalor14 minutes ago
      Network effect.

      Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+

    • retinaros15 minutes ago
      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
    • sieabahlpark14 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • sriniwasx17 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • archonis2 hours ago
    This is what anti-trust laws were for.
    • bpodgursky11 minutes ago
      How do you anticipate NVIDIA using Hugging Face to abuse monopoly power?
    • echelonan hour ago
      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.

      • sschuelleran hour ago
        > 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.