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What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
by Gigachad 2mo ago
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
- dylan604 2mo agoIsn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.
- RachelF 2mo agoI guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.
- esseph 2mo agoMaybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
- sebmellen 2mo agoI see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.
- toyg 2mo agoSo much this. It's like Apple buying Shazam or any other software company, they do it to bring value to their hardware platform.
- a_wild_dandan 2mo agoMaybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?
- Gigachad 2mo agoFile hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors. Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
- dragonwriter 2mo agoNVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
- dragonwriter 2mo agoThey have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
- andy99 2mo agoDidn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
- siliconpotato 2mo agoThis. They are buying a brick in the xkcd #2347 diagram
- Gigachad 2mo agoI’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoThis is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
- Gigachad 2mo agoNot really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate. Google is obvious. Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo agoWhether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's
- calebkaiser 2mo agoThey hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
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- itemize123 2mo agoondemand cloud? b2b?
- raincole 2mo agoIf GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoit's literally the GitHub for AI
- Gigachad 2mo agoGithub was acquired for $7B. It's hard for me to see how HF is worth almost double Github.
- kube-system 2mo agoGitHub was acquired for 10B in 2026 dollars. And software on HF requires quite a bit more hardware expenditure to run.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoAI is the current thing, HF does the current thing. Hype cycles in computing anyone?
- alex1138 2mo agoIt hugs your face
- ggcr 2mo agoHere is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1] > We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...] I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc. [1] https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706 https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706
- zoobab 2mo agoan FTP server delivering tarballs.
- blackoil 2mo agoHaving an account of practically every software engineer remotely interested in AI....Profit
- heybear 2mo ago[flagged]