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Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want
by GeertB 1mo ago
Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
- rvz 1mo agoNvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source. Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore. Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.
- paufernandez 1mo agoI'm still rooting for Modular, though.
- silisili 1mo agoI assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that. Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers. I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
- rvz 1mo agoWe can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux. Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest. Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source). So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.
- silisili 1mo agoI'll give credit to Intel, they've always been open source friendly and I prefer to buy them because I'm not a gamer, so don't need the best. AMD is another story. Their binary closed source blobs were even worse than nvidias for many years. So much so people used terrible performance open source tries just to avoid the headache. That they finally slopped together an open source version after they'd lost the GPU race isn't exactly noble. But as an open source supporter in general, I commend the effort still.
- latchkey 1mo ago> no-one cares anymore. possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.
- rvz 1mo agoJust say you don't know. Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway. Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?
- latchkey 1mo ago> they were going to do open source it anyway. uh huh. > Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development? you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.
- rvz 1mo ago> uh huh. Exactly. You're one of those that don't care. Mojo's standard library was open sourced a year before the acquisition. > you ever ask Nvidia why? i did. The correct answer to my question is "No". CUDA or NVCC was never open sourced during its lifetime. Since you "claim" to have asked them and know the true reason why is not open source, just say what Nvidia told you verbatim right here. Intel and AMD have no problem open sourcing their GPU drivers for Linux, but Nvidia has a problem with that. We can only speculate that "open sourcing" it reveals their GPU trade secrets and their intellectual property for others to copy.
- latchkey 1mo agoI care, I just don't believe you in that statement. There were "confidential nda" notes embedded in the release that Chris didn't remove until afterwards. That doesn't scream: "we're going to open source this some day!" If it was going to "eventually" be made open source, why not do it from the start? Why not do it a year in? From what I was told, your speculation is incorrect. I can't say anything more than that, sorry. I don't know why you're so aggressive in tone towards me, chill out.
- chii 1mo ago> as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest. this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector. It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.
- coderenegade 1mo agoIt's a clever move if that's what they're doing. They're restricted in China, and are likely to face stiff competition from Chinese chipmakers in the coming years. Acquiring the largest repository of trainable models and ensuring they run better on Nvidia hardware is probably one of the few moves they have for keeping ahead of the competition. I mean, it would be terrible for the consumer, but it does make me think that NVDA is a decent investment.
- high_na_euv 1mo agoWhy would they have to acquire hf in order to optimize their stack for those models? Couldnt they just take those models anyway?
- coderenegade 1mo agoWell now that they own it, they can do whatever they like. They don't necessarily have to be optimizing the models for their hardware, they could just setup preferential pipelines to funnel users to their ecosystem. That seems fairly prudent given the challenges coming their way.
- robocat 1mo agoIf you don't own the customer relationship, you don't own the profit. See App store, FB. NVidia is delivering commodity hardware to the hyperscalers, and would eventually get commodity margins (when hyperscalers make their models work on their own hardware). Amazing article on relevant economics of squeezing vendors - actually about antitrust ad-models but: The answer is that [advertising based] companies are an ideal test case for an increasingly common business meta-model, where companies try to create a consumer surplus at one end in order to maximize their negotiating leverage for capturing the producer surplus everywhere else in their supply chain. https://www.thediff.co/archive/ad-supported-platforms-are-a-unique-antitrust-problem https://www.thediff.co/archive/ad-supported-platforms-are-a-... Perhaps not relevant to huggingface, sorry.
- 392 1mo agoI think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer. Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk. There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026). So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.
- zenoprax 1mo ago> There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026). Your reference lacks authority, veracity, and reproducibility.
- otabdeveloper4 1mo agoIt came to me in a dream.
- bbor 1mo agoThey’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!
- r0b05 1mo agoWe are so used to these numbers being thrown around in the AI era that something one needs a reminder that this is 13 billion, not million. Insane exit by HF.
- techpression 1mo agoWas looking for this comment, the tech world has gotten completely insane with ”valuations”. I would love to hear why it was 13 and not 5. It would still be completely insane at 5 billion, but someone though they should add another 8…
- dannyw 1mo agoNVIDIA is one of the most open labs. They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset-v2 https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin... Which other lab shares this? Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN). There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.
- jrflowers 1mo agolol “Everything you said is correct but you’re wrong because I’m thinking about something other than what you were talking about”
- bigyabai 1mo agoCUDA is proprietary for a pretty understandable reason. There's no good way for Nvidia to standardize it. They supported OpenCL when Khronos floated the idea of a GPGPU standard to manufacturers, but OEMs didn't want to design scalable hardware or sponsor the software.
- willy_k 1mo agoNVIDIA is a lot more than a “lab”.
- matheusmoreira 1mo ago> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement. I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.
- bdangubic 1mo agonothing stopping you from doing that
- cyberrock 1mo ago>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA. [0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-korea/#The_rise_of_Nvidia_AMD_hardware_and_its_impact_on_Linux https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...
- troyvit 1mo agoHe definitely sounds more pragmatic than before, which is, in a sense, more positive. > This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.
- azernik 1mo agoHe's always been pragmatic - it's just that Nvidia's behavior has AFAICT actually changed.
- rbwkap 1mo agoHe has been positive about corporations and mainstream propaganda since his CoC "retreat". He is no rebel anymore. Now Nvidia is also premium sponsor of the Linux Foundation.
- jijji 1mo agoI for one welcome our new robot overlords.
- lambda 1mo agoNvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets. Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others. I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware. I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.
- andrewinardeer 1mo agoWhat would be the worst three?
- rocqua 1mo agoThe worry is not that Nvidia isn’t open about their models. The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoI think this is part of an open-source play. I'm not arguing your other points, I think they're true. They're trying to mix up the competitive landscape(that doesn't impact their bottom line, and I don't think opensource is eating their lunch), so I don't think this is fake, at least that's my initial take.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kodoman 1mo agoAs a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it's quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will still be happy to host I am sure why not China? The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don't use that and don't see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.
- FuckButtons 1mo agoHf’s python / transformers is a hot mess. It conflates so many different ideas into huge monoliths that it’s barely usable for anything other than the small snippets listed for trying out models. They need to take a machete to all the cross coupling they’ve metastasized.
- kodoman 1mo agoTotally not sure why any one would use it for anything other then if they stumbled across it and where completely green.
- villgax 1mo agoAs opposed to whom else? Do you think any of the other labs or acccelerators are clamoring for open source hardware?
- aurareturn 1mo agoArguably, this move will help AI open source market more. Nvidia has an incentive to make AI open source competitive with closed source. If OpenAI or Anthropic gains in market share, they will eventually gain power over hardware vendors as well, which Nvidia does not want. Nvidia wants people and companies to go choose a free open model, run that model on Nvidia hardware. And because Nvidia can't fully control what hardware an AI model can run, Apple Silicon and AMD hardware users will benefit as well.
- teiferer 1mo agoDude, the source of an LLM is the training data and the training algorithm. Those are not open, so stop calling it open source. Open weights correspond to "binary available" for software. Nobody would call that "open source". (Even ignoring the licensing which "open source" normally entails.)
- reverius42 1mo agoMany open weight models do actually have open training data and training algorithms -- I think especially some from Nvidia!
- teiferer 1mo agoThat's commendable! Though we agree that the term isn't typically used that way in the LLM context, right?
- aurareturn 1mo agoDude, many of them are open source and open data on Hugging face, including some Nvidia LLM models.
- crabbone 1mo agoHey. I worked there, and I'm no longer bound by their PR policy, so I can mention this. Also, know that the fact that I worked there doesn't make me privy to their high-level strategic decisions, this is a more look from the trenches kind of thing. My impression I've developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia's relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don't know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it. Here's an anecdotal "success story" which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise. So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new "feature" which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run "jobs", including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of "help" from AI. I was tasked with testing it. Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the "distributed" part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle's MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle's product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle's proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn't support the "distributed" part of the "solution". It was pitched as the "first step on the way there". So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the "solution" doesn't solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back. I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the "solution" had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn't do a research. He just used what he knew. Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn't face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.
- Gormo 1mo agoIf that's true, it may bode well for the future. The AI boom creates some strong incentives for Nvidia to develop an intentional strategy for software generally and FOSS specifically, and there's a chance that could influence the rest of the company in a very positive direction. Hopefully, what they learn by working with HF and having the value of their hardware products increasingly determined by their ability to run FOSS software stacks will backwash into the rest of the company, or at least make them much more aware of the problem at all levels. I do think that they still might be a bit reticent to release fully open-source drivers, though, only because of the extent to which hardware design could be inferred from the driver source. OTOH, AI itself is making disassembling and reverse engineering binary code easier and easier, so there might not be much of a point to withholding the source in the near future.
- onel 1mo agoDisagree. When it comes to AI, mvidia has been one of the most open labs. They open source a lot things and are open to contributions
- jorisw 1mo ago> They want > They want [citation needed]
- cromka 1mo ago> Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. Their strategy for AI is pretty clear and they bank on on-premises OSS models for the busines, with their really cool open-source software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY This is a really good watch and is a glimpse into what the actual future shapes up to be considering the current situation in where the OSS Chinese models successfully compete with proprietary US ones.
- empath75 1mo agoI am not sure you need to posit nefarious intent for this to be a bad deal for the industry at large. Basically the only provider of GPUs getting into vertical integration is a classic monopoly move and I hope regulators look very hard at this.
- mococa 1mo ago> No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. 100%