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Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia
- warthog 3y agoIt is crazy to me that it is still 100x the ARR at this stage. I think for Deel, it as around 12x
- immortal3 3y agoTo add further, i do not know what is end goal of hugging face. 1. They have inference API but all cloud provider can implement those in next year. 2. They offer subscription but market-size of subscription is questionable. 3. I hope this new set of funding don't bring problem to them because making money with open source is hard and at this scale of funding it might be even harder. It see what happens in next set of years.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago1. Raise $$$ 3. Spend $$$ 4. Exit w/ $
- nytesky 3y agoTake money off the table, that’s what all the startup gurus call it, but whose money is kinda the question. Have pension funds stopped chasing VC funds etc?
- smcleod 3y agoThe companies that invest have products (or have other investments with products) that have a strong market - they end up increasing the price of products to cover the purchase of acquisitions and losses. This results in inflation and worsening wealth distribution.
- PeterisP 3y agoThe article is quite clear on whose money it is - "Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures". For at least half of them, it might make sense to simply sponsor accelerating worldwide new AI product development because those new products will increase sales of their hardware and services; pitch in $20m together with others to support efforts like Huggingface, while expecting that their tools will indirectly cause an extra $1b sales for you in the next few years.
- fulladder 3y ago>Have pension funds stopped chasing VC funds etc? Yes, they have. Higher bond yields (compared to 0% three years ago) is causing pension funds to shift their allocation away from "alternative" investments (vc & pe), so it has become harder to raise a new VC fund these days.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoGitHub for ML models? If they can anchor themselves to the open-source developer network, their acquisition value is in a tech giant being able to cross-sell to that community.
- verdverm 3y agoAre they going to spend that money recreating Code Host features like PRs, code scanning, CI? I'm not going to host my code on multiple platforms, pretty easy to make a model available for download with S3
- smcleod 3y agoProbably the same as most privately funded tech startups 1) Gain user base 2) Take investment funding 3) Sell and make the people at the top rich 4) Repeat.
- stevenae 3y agoI suppose the argument would be switching costs -- what stops any cloud provider from being interchangeable with another?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoBuying a lottery ticket is buying a dream. You too can raise like this if you sell a dream to people with deep pockets who will only be mildly perturbed when it goes bust.
- nytesky 3y agoI saw this and thought it was a startup in homage to a xenomorph facehugger. Ironic, since we are worried about AI destroying humanity.
- fidotron 3y agoML models are the new apps. There is a huge opening for an App Store type situation which enables people to buy models and integrate them into their products, handling the appropriate licensing. Bonus points for certifying the models actually do what they say. That by itself will probably become a mini industry. Hugging Face are the clear leaders in terms of having mindshare in the community to be able to build it.
- dbish 3y agoModels != apps, they’re closer to the backend for apps or a core library, so your customers aren’t “everyone with a phone/computer” like an app, it’s the much smaller, but potentially high impact, “everyone who creates apps”. We’re not in a world where non tech people are searching for models in the model store from their phone.
- fidotron 3y agoWe are already in a world where “artists” are exchanging models online based on their ability to generate certain outputs.
- alberth 3y agoConfusing Pricing. https://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.
- espadrine 3y agoThey are covering a range of use-cases. I agree the naming is inconsistent. It goes like this: • Repository storage is free, with a paid enterprise offering, à la GitHub. • Serving a demo app has hourly costs (“Spaces Hardware”) • Serving a production model for an app hosted elsewhere is also hourly (“Inference endpoints”) • Training models is free for now (“AutoTrain”; honestly I haven’t tried this one.)
- throwaway644788 3y agoThe whole GTM is confusing. They're experts at ML and community, and awful at business. I know HN looks down on sales persons, but HF needs some good ones, ASAP.
- ShamelessC 3y ago> experts at ML Citation needed.
- kiratp 3y agoI love Huggingface. I worry they will be the next Docker. What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.
- ramesh31 3y ago>What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer. Network effect. It's more like a GitHub for ML. Also trust. When your business is hosting binaries, that's no small feat.
- ulrikhansen54 3y agoThey also have an insane amount of traffic - very envious, they'll be able to capitalise on other things as soon as they start to build commercial products people are willing to pay big money for.
- CardenB 3y agoWhat do people think separated GitHub from docker? Docker also had DockerHub, but it wasn’t as necessary as GitHub and didn’t catch on as well. I think HF is more like docker than GitHub. GitHub had the wide scope to be huge. Docker was too niche (in comparison) and didn’t catch on so much to be necessary for every single project like Git did. Similarly, HF is also niche in the sense that docker is. There’s no need to host your model on HF, it’s just a convenience for some projects. It’s effectively a package manager for ML models. It seems that if there’s a way to make models more easily runnable, HF would not be necessary at all. They have a community there, but it’s not something that can be monetized well.
- hereonout2 3y agoDockerhub is great for sharing images with the world at large, much like HF is for models. But once you're at the point where you want to host your images / models for business use do you really still want them? All cloud providers seem to have an image hosting feature, why go through hassle of managing and paying for a docker hub account when you're already on AWS and can integrate better with ECR? The same problem exists for ML model hosting IMO. Github is totally different, it's a more complex and human proposition. For many github has replaced an entire raft of tools, not just code hosting.
- QuadrupleA 3y agoHugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse. Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace? Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoYeah, enjoy the free beer and have a plan to take a case with you when the bar is closing.
- cloogshicer 3y agoUnless the bar gets so big that all the other bars go out of business like with YouTube and many other monopolies/oligopolies.
- echelon 3y agoGitHub is pretty excellent.
- nkingsy 3y agoIt’s a loss leader so msft can point to something when you complain about the abusive hellscape that is modern windows.
- esafak 3y agoWorks for me; I don't really use Windows. Also GitHub is paid so it does not have to be a loss leader.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoIs it really? It’s the “SaaS” all startups I’ve seen seem happy to pay for.
- alberth 3y agoGenuine question … What business are you in when selling AI/ML? I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”. And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML? Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell? To use an analogy, if you’re selling AI/ML, are you in the IaaS industry, PaaS industry, SaaS industry (or something else?)
- tilne 3y agoAren’t you in all of those? The further you keep the user away from training and hosting, the less you’re in those businesses. But I would think it’s only economical to do that if you have some type of advantage in implementing the things you’re abstracting away.
- traveler1 3y agoI think the opposite may be true. If you control the training and hosting, surely that means you have to be more involved in many industries to make the product useful? Whereas with offloading training/tuning to the user, you kinda just become PaaS, in that you provide a platform which enables others.
- nemo44x 3y agoThey are selling picks and shovels. There will be a few huge winners in the AI space, a good amount of modest winners, and a lot of losers. They don't care who wins or loses but are happy to sell the supplies needed for anyone that wants to take a shot. If they can make it easier and worthwhile to use their product and create business value, then they will sell a lot of picks and shovels.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoYep. Meta is spending $22 B on CapEx over 2 years without any plan of how to use it, with about half of it tied to buying shit tons of H100 to go in custom servers.
- solarkraft 3y agoOh. When I last read about it I thought it was meant to be sustainable. I hope the founders take their share home and have fun burning the rest. At least hopefully some open software/AI models will have come out of it when the company collapses under its own weight.
- solarkraft 3y ago1) What do they want with all that money? 2) How in the world are they going to pay it back? They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.
- orwin 3y agoIt's not a loan, they're selling shares.
- dbish 3y agoThere is expectation you return value though. I think that’s what most people mean when saying “pay it back” regarding investments like this.
- stevofolife 3y agoWelcome to VC 101: 1) Grow 2) They don't. It's not a loan. VC world doesn't operate on loans. You go to the bank for that.
- jvalencia 3y agoFrom Nvidias point of view, this might be an investment in their own business via network effects rather than a straight up investment in Hugging Face. I hope so, because when the VC money goes, the billing will go through the roof.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoReally, throughout the entire funding process no one raised the similarity of "Hugging Face" to "Face-huggers", the larval name for the Xenomorphs from Alien?
- julien_c 3y agowe have a secret plan to change our logo to a Face Hugger some time in the future :)
- glompers 3y agoThere is that.
- mistrial9 3y agoexcept that it is literally named for a friendly and non-offensive chat signal.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoRight?! I actually did think it was named after face huggers and wondered about the terrible branding...
- thrillgore 3y agoAre they gonna change licenses in the next week, too?
- chakintosh 3y agoHF is the literal implementation of the old idiom "During the gold rush, sell shovels."
- stagger87 3y agoI've said this on HN before, but Nvidia is the one selling shovels IMO.
- mousetree 3y agoEveryone has said this
- frozencell 3y agoIMO HF sell tents and Nvidia sell shovels
- kordlessagain 3y agoHF feels more like mules than tents to me.
- jedberg 3y agoI love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)
- mmaunder 3y agoInteresting situation with public markets funding Nvidia which is investing in its own customers, driving further strong financial results driving further public investment. A high risk high reward play. Nvidia is eating AI.
- riku_iki 3y ago> They know that money is coming right back to them. it is totally can be condition of investment round: have specific vendor as compute provider.
- jedberg 3y agoIt could be, but I'm guessing they don't even have to.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoNvidia is likely to have a $36-40 B revenue year this year and next because of massive customer investments. Meta is spending $8 B on their gear and about the same next year. OpenAI+Microsoft are likely following suit with several billion in server buildout. I'm curious if Google or Apple will be adding large swaths of AI boxes to their fleet too.
- hospitalJail 3y agoTime to find a new website to share models.
- sleepybrett 3y agoHugging face is a terrible name for an ai company. Predicting it suffocating us all both mentally and physically?
- Apocryphon 3y agoI like how companies are embracing branding that evokes cyberpunk and other genres of dystopian science fiction.
- rvnx 3y agoLike Soylent ?
- jtsiskin 3y agoIt’s named after the emoji; started as a chat app for teens: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-become-your-artificial-bff/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-wants-to-beco...
- mlguy123 3y agothrowaway since since i used to be affiliated with them. HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow. While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.
- asadm 3y agoThey will be acquired. Either by Google or MS.
- alberth 3y agoMS has already invested $10B in OpenAI, so they aren’t going to be a buyer. Google has poured hundreds of million into Anthropic due to Eric Schmidt, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoMeta?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asadm 3y agoBoth Anthropic and OpenAI are not a replacement for huggingface. Which has complete monopoly on model hosting right now.
- nmfisher 3y agoMonopoly is a stretch. Half of the models I try come direct from GitHub (and almost 100% of all model code comes from GH too). Hosting binaries isn't really a stable business model.
- steno132 3y agoCongratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative. What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.
- espadrine 3y agoWhat does X.ai seek: democratization or centralization? If it wants everyone to fork its models, having the model on Huggingface and using its libraries will increase adoption, as people are used to that format, having the quantization built-in, etc. Having to perform model conversions slows things down, despite TheBloke’s constant efforts to convert every format to every other. If the model will only be accessible through CLI, APIs, or a website UI, then custom can make sense.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoWhy not both? Y'all could host models on HF, and use the HF format/download code (which is quite good). But make a pretty frontend for it. Down the road you could just host your own backend implementing the HF API, if such a thing is necessary.
- dbish 3y agoIf you’re hosting for your own use, unclear why you wouldn’t just do that directly on cloud instances. If you’re trying to share models with others publicly, then HF is the best option right now.
- jprd 3y agoGoodness, good luck and congrats! I am curious however, why name drop Elon and X.ai when asking this question? With all due respect, I'm not sure how that is going to advance the technical conversation, and in some regards may indeed de-rail it and hinder the mentoring you might receive? I hope I do not sound combative! I am generally curious, as I see this behavior at $JOB, but in reverse. "My customer is seeing this." "I have a customer that is asking Y." I am generally curious on the different perspectives that teammates can come from, that can drive them to take wildly non-congruent approaches, even with similar career experiences.
- thunkshift1 3y agoWhy salesforce?? It seems the want in on everything fancy in the market (looking at slack)
- dbish 3y agoThey have a VC arm that just looks for and does investments which doesn’t necessarily means salesforce proper is interested in the tech (though I’m sure there is some of that), kind of like Google Ventures.
- waterheater 3y agoThe real question is why the company doesn't use .ml as a domain name alias. Edit: dang, guess HN strips out emojis from posts. The Punycode version of the Hugging Face emoji on a relevant TLD supporting emoji domains would be http://xn--zp9h.ml/ http://xn--zp9h.ml/
- weego 3y agoI don't know what this could ever do that isn't easily reproducible with a tiny fraction of that investment. Fragmentation of communities is an absolute given in software. Added to the fact that of they get too dominant they'll get leveraged out of the supply chain and I'm not sure what the value proposition is here. I mean obviously I'll be wrong but it's hard to not be skeptical
- mywacaday 3y agoI hadn't heard of Hugging Face before and the first though that came to mind was the face huggers from the Alien movies
- ineedtocall 3y agoI'm waiting on something like gumroad, but for curated models and datasets.
- ckdarby 3y agoIsn't it a bit funny that Nvidia puts money into a company that is going to spend a large chunk of that capital right back at Nvidia. I wouldn't be surprised if there is little to near zero risk for Nvidia with this bet.