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Hugging 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
by QuadrupleA 3y ago
Hugging 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.
- judge2020 3y agoIt'll go the same route as Docker. Anyone relying on it for critical software will pay, everyone else will use alternative but compatible sources once it's no longer free.
- no_wizard 3y agoI think with Docker's recent pivots, its clear that they thought they were going to be the container company, but Swarm never caught on, and Dockerhub never really evolved beyond hosting images (though, its verified images feature is nice). What Docker ended up accelerating at is reproducible development environments that tear down and spin up easily. I think this is the largest faction of docker users. It never translated into a high volume of Docker Swarm and related sell through features materializing though. That's what a swath of all their new paid features are focused on enterprise things like SSO, auditing etc. For Hugging Face, they will need to have a compelling set of features that make it either hard to migrate off of or vastly preferable to other options the majority of the time. Right now, their most compelling feature is being (mostly) free
- taminka 3y agoi'm curious what HF does, because iiuc they're mostly just hosting model files? i know that they have some compute offers, and also created/maintain a few libraries, but it's not particularly widely used, i'm really not sure how they're supposed to earn money...
- ladberg 3y agoI think their "spaces" (i.e. running tons of models for free with a nice UI) are widely used.
- dbish 3y agoThis isn’t sustainable though. Compute is expensive, maybe they’ll end up with paid plans for anyone trying to use a space
- ShamelessC 3y agoThose are pretty lackluster in my experience. Do they even support GPUs? And in any case, it seems like they go down for anything sufficiently popular.
- hereonout2 3y agoI've been asking myself that for a while. Would they be so popular if they didn't host & serve petabytes of model files for free? How will they monetize that aspect to match this valuation? Whilst the scale of their model hosting is impressive, the functionality seems pretty basic. The models are just BLOBs in git LFS repos, you're usually relying on knowing which users to follow, then learning the way they name their models and how that naming convention applies to the particular framework and hardware you're using. As an example the user "TheBloke" is prolific at publishing LLM models for various hardware / framework combos, but look how little the HF interface actually helps navigate or find what you're after: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke https://huggingface.co/TheBloke Also, is anybody using HF Hub in "production"? We've deployed a few LLMs now and once we've decided on a model the first thing we do is get it off HF and into our own storage ready for deployment. There seems no reason to tightly integrate HF Hub with production systems given it's a just a bunch of files you can copy and keep.
- version_five 3y agoThey represent a real risk to the AI ecosystem IMO (or opportunity if you're an investor). They have really cornered the market on model hosting as well as frameworks for running them, it's going to get ugly when they start turning the screws. I think it's important for people to diversify away from them and not build anything that uniquely depends on them. It's not good to have chokepoints like this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- htrp 3y agoDo they really? As far as I can tell, diffusers/transformer are open sourced wrappers around torch implementations, there are a bunch of companies that are offering inference (just like they are), and there is some value in offering S3 storage to allow for model search. If they reach a point where they actively become community-hostile, someone will just fork their codebase and release a web app called "FaceHugger"
- jeroenhd 3y agoTheir Git LFS based hosting is used by a lot of AI tools. Huggingface level data storage and transfer would also be VERY costly to accomplish for a small party. Some of these models are several gigabytes in size and downloaded hundreds or thousands of time per day. What they do isn't too hard to replicate, but the price for which they do it is impossible to compete with.
- htrp 3y agoIf Amazon/Google/Microsoft wanted to own that space, they could do it in a heartbeat. Rumor has it Github is actively working on something similar to HF Hub already
- mistrial9 3y agoagile ; community-minded ; efficient pick one if you are lucky. Those Fortune-12 giants can't do anything "in a heartbeat" .. listen to what that means.. nonsense
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago> enjoy the free beer from the VCs. Careful not to become dependent on the free beer.
- Palmik 3y agoAccording to Clement (the HF CEO) they are close to covering their costs, and have 10years runway: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue/status/1694765357968286159 https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue/status/16947653579682861...
- version_five 3y agoCan someone who knows the VC industry explain why having 10 years runway would be considered good? Aren't these companies supposed to be deploying capital as quickly as possible, not banking it. If a ceo said they needed your money 5+ years from now, wouldn't you wait until then to commit?
- echelon 3y ago> If a ceo said they needed your money 5+ years from now, wouldn't you wait until then to commit? Why would a CEO give up equity if they don't need the capital? Wouldn't they prefer not to sell big chunks of flesh? If he's not deploying it now, maybe the CEO is predicting rough times ahead and wants to de-risk for future cash flow or fundraising turbulence? Isn't that, too, a kind of negative signal? Or is this all prudent?
- hustwindmaple1 3y agoThere are times when capital is cheap and abundant and there are times capital is scarce and hard to come by
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoFOMO is a thing among VCs. You may not be let in the round 5 years from now, or the price may be less favorable, etc.
- stevofolife 3y agoSomeone who knows the VC industry should chime in on this - but AFAIK, companies don't get all their money from investor at once.
- shmatt 3y agoenshittification is such nonsense. the original article gives Facebook, TikTok, Amazon and other super successful super profitable companies as an example "Then collapse" - nope, then generate tens of billions of profit per quarter. Im sure the people of Hugging Face would love that
- claytonjy 3y ago"enshittification" doesn't refer to a change in _investor_ value, but to _user_ value. Facebook does make a ton of money, but at the expense of the user experience. They got huge by providing a great UX and making no money; it was the need to make money that triggered enshittification.
- throw10920 3y ago> "enshittification" doesn't refer to a change in _investor_ value "enshittification" doesn't refer to anything at all. It's a political term meant to be used by anti-corporate causes - it doesn't have a real definition because it's a made-up word with no value other than activism.
- latentcall 3y agoIs anti-corporate a bad thing? Is activism also bad? Aren’t all words made up? The word does indeed refer to something. Just because you disagree with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
- throw10920 3y agoActivism is fine. Not on HN. Words are made up all the time, but "enshittification" is currently nothing more than a trendy piece of jargon that basically only exists on HN (and maybe Reddit), and is definitely not appropriate here. > The word does indeed refer to something. Just because you disagree with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. That's irrelevant here. Virtually everyone would agree that the word "libtard" also refers to something, but very few would actually appreciate it being used.
- iambateman 3y agoMaybe? Probably? Probably. As a counter point, GitHub has remained great for longer than expected, and has arguably improved since being bought by Microsoft. One can hope that their example will help set the expectation for other platforms like HF
- mistrial9 3y agowhat you do not know can hurt you ... behind closed doors they have added the equivalent of Airport Security on users, repos and access. Expect a profit center of maintaining your valid ID so you can start work each day.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoIt seems the enshittification cycle may have resulted at least in part from the Blitzscaling methodology [1]. Are there any studies on the effectiveness of Blitzscaling in general? I wonder if it's a net success or not. [1]:https://www.blitzscaling.com/ https://www.blitzscaling.com/
- weeblewobble 3y agoHonestly when you put it like that it sounds like a pretty sweet deal. We get a few years of irrationally cheap services for free? I’ll take that. VC-subsidized Ubers were awesome in my mid 20s. It’s too expensive now for everyday use but I still banked all that consumer surplus.