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HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes throu

by armcat 1mo ago

HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes through). Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. On the positive note, the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. For Nvidia this is a great strategic play as it potentially gains control of the "AI app store" and can influence the direction of Transformers, Diffusers, PEFT and various other HF libs inits favour. At the same time Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI and has contributed significantly via Nemotron and various optimisers close to the metal. This would likely accelerate further. Nvidia has everything to gain from having a massive open model ecosystem, instead of a consolidated market consisting of 2-3 players. Will that have impact on MLX and other contributions? We'll see!

codemog 1mo ago
> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation. Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival. But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.
- 6bb32646d83d 1mo ago
  A good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality
  - aatd86 1mo ago
    It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha. (half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
  - jvwww 29d ago
    Yeah exactly. I remember speaking to someone working at a YC company who was complaining about the quality of their codebase. I then asked him if the company was making a lot of money - he said yes, it was super successful.
  - gedy 23d ago
    For the founders maybe, rarely the employees. (No not employee #2, etc)
- pizza 1mo ago
  They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?
  - dpoloncsak 25d ago
    I think both can be true at the same time. They provided insane value, and while I'm not sure if they were first, they were most people's introduction during the initial LLM boom. Their code was also sloppy, and the org was mismanaged. Sometimes, success really is just 'right place, right time'
- pc86 1mo ago
  I wonder if they had been more pure technically, would have they been acquired for more than $13 billion? Less? Acquired at all?
- AntiqueFig 1mo ago
  > But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI. Yeah probably more like the frontier of early retirement.
- fantispug 29d ago
  Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier. When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment. BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software. Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right. I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.
  - MachineMan 29d ago
    From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.
- Der_Einzige 29d ago
  You mean DRY as in the LLM sampling technique "Don't repeat yourself"?
_the_inflator 1mo ago
I don't get the EU reference in any sense: "The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all. Mistral is heavily state funded via Banks that are predominantly owned by the French state, so I don't get it. Also name one global success that doesn't came from US? China? Well, second place maybe, but second in any sense. Nevertheless, kudos to huggingface. Not only to the founders, but to the ecosystem and I guess it got harder by the day to finance all the hosting and only hope for the future, that Nvidia will help HF to thrive, at least not put burdens on them. GitHub is still alive, and hope that HF will benefit from more AI power. Nvidia doesn't have any disadvantages in my playbook, because hardware wise, there is no one to beat them in any regard and Apple will always stay nichy. So well played - hopefully. It could be worse or even a shut down otherwise, who knows. So for me it sounds cool and I am glad that EU isn't involved in any regard. As the AI Act demands full disclosure under really easy to match requirements into your inner workings, this is quite the opposite of freely sharing information.
- cdmckay 1mo ago
  China as “second place in any sense” ignores reality. TikTok: achieved global cultural and algorithmic dominance. DJI: controls roughly 70% of the global consumer and commercial drone market. CATL: The world’s largest EV battery manufacturer. BYD: Surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicle production volume. Shein & Temu The list goes on…
  - PaulHoule 1mo ago
    Europe will talk tepidly about reusable rockets, China will develop reusable rockets.
  - Art9681 1mo ago
    The list goes on for products and services they cloned from western innovation. China didn't get there first in any of the categories you listed. Of course, people would rather spend less than more, disregarding the quality and longevity of the product. Paying pennies on the dollar for a BYD vehicle sounds great when all you consider is the initial sticker price. The real cost is what happens after you buy the disposable car and own it for a decade. So yea. Second place is the reality and it is also true for AI models, and the hardware needed to run them. Also, congratulations on landing a rocket 11 years after the US. Took long enough.
jrochkind1 1mo ago
> Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI Nothing paradoxical about it, open source AI use raises demand for nvidia's chips too.
- davrosthedalek 1mo ago
  And I would say it's actually a more secure future demand channel than the hyperscalers. Openai and co can build their own chips, so they won't buy from NVidia. But they probably won't sell them to somebody else, so everyone who wants to run their own install (and can, not the least because of HF), will buy Nvidia.
- dpoloncsak 1mo ago
  Locking the next generation of programmers into CUDA
  - John7878781 1mo ago
    Translating CUDA kernels to ROCm (or any other ecosystem, tbh) is going to become trivially easy with AI. Not saying that code is the only glue that Nvidia has when it comes to their ecosystem, but it’s certainly a large part of it.
    - tovej 1mo ago
      It's not that difficult at the moment. Don't know why you would need an LLM to translate between two nearly identical language extensions. Optimization is different, but that's not really a translation level task.
      - spunker540 29d ago
        If an LLM can do a rote task for me, I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it
        tovej 28d ago
nailer 1mo ago
> HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. This is wildly offtopic, but: what's it been like for you? A niche seemingly academic interest in 2016 has exploded into revolutionary practicality. I bet you have some insights and good stories.
cbeach 29d ago
> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation Three French founders set up the company in New York, raised their money from American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) and are now selling to an American chip company for $12.9B. Europe's most successful AI company was only ever European in the nationality of its founders. > the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe Why would they do that? They already moved to America once to build a company. Since then the EU has passed the AI Act (obligations on general purpose model providers in force since August 2025), so the incentive to build the next one in Europe is weaker than it was in 2016, not stronger. Ambitious Europeans have been voting with their feet for decades. The EU could fix this any time it liked by getting out of the way of its own entrepreneurs, but it prefers to write more regulation and then complain about "sovereignty" when the businesses it drove away get bought.
- bawana 29d ago
  Do the American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia)get a piece of that 12.9B? or most of it?
  - saidnooneever 28d ago
    it would be a bit weird if nvidia paid to nvidia but ok
TacticalCoder 29d ago
> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown. There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent. No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's sake. SAP. Let that sink in: the biggest EU software company is ranked 65th biggest company in the world. There's, thankfully, ASML but that's it. > ... which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. Wishful thinking. I don't buy it for a second that it's going to be a "big win". And France is a country that hates its rich with a passion: they'll now be seen as demons, not just for having sold to the US... But simply for being very rich. People have no idea at which point we in the EU are totally screwed. Why would these guys come back to France only to see their wealth confiscated? I certainly wouldn't. Screw the EU.
- maleldil 29d ago
  No mention to Mistral?
  - XajniN 26d ago
    [dead]

by armcat 1mo ago

codemog 1mo ago

> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation. Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival. But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.

6bb32646d83d 1mo ago
A good reminder that moving fast and getting product fit >>>>> code quality
- aatd86 1mo ago
  It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist... Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha. (half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly. I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
- jvwww 29d ago
  Yeah exactly. I remember speaking to someone working at a YC company who was complaining about the quality of their codebase. I then asked him if the company was making a lot of money - he said yes, it was super successful.
- gedy 23d ago
  For the founders maybe, rarely the employees. (No not employee #2, etc)
pizza 1mo ago
They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?
- dpoloncsak 25d ago
  I think both can be true at the same time. They provided insane value, and while I'm not sure if they were first, they were most people's introduction during the initial LLM boom. Their code was also sloppy, and the org was mismanaged. Sometimes, success really is just 'right place, right time'
pc86 1mo ago
I wonder if they had been more pure technically, would have they been acquired for more than $13 billion? Less? Acquired at all?
AntiqueFig 1mo ago
> But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI. Yeah probably more like the frontier of early retirement.
fantispug 29d ago
Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier. When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant. And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment. BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama. Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software. Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right. I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.
- MachineMan 29d ago
  From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.
Der_Einzige 29d ago
You mean DRY as in the LLM sampling technique "Don't repeat yourself"?

_the_inflator 1mo ago

I don't get the EU reference in any sense: "The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all. Mistral is heavily state funded via Banks that are predominantly owned by the French state, so I don't get it. Also name one global success that doesn't came from US? China? Well, second place maybe, but second in any sense. Nevertheless, kudos to huggingface. Not only to the founders, but to the ecosystem and I guess it got harder by the day to finance all the hosting and only hope for the future, that Nvidia will help HF to thrive, at least not put burdens on them. GitHub is still alive, and hope that HF will benefit from more AI power. Nvidia doesn't have any disadvantages in my playbook, because hardware wise, there is no one to beat them in any regard and Apple will always stay nichy. So well played - hopefully. It could be worse or even a shut down otherwise, who knows. So for me it sounds cool and I am glad that EU isn't involved in any regard. As the AI Act demands full disclosure under really easy to match requirements into your inner workings, this is quite the opposite of freely sharing information.

cdmckay 1mo ago
China as “second place in any sense” ignores reality. TikTok: achieved global cultural and algorithmic dominance. DJI: controls roughly 70% of the global consumer and commercial drone market. CATL: The world’s largest EV battery manufacturer. BYD: Surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicle production volume. Shein & Temu The list goes on…
- PaulHoule 1mo ago
  Europe will talk tepidly about reusable rockets, China will develop reusable rockets.
- Art9681 1mo ago
  The list goes on for products and services they cloned from western innovation. China didn't get there first in any of the categories you listed. Of course, people would rather spend less than more, disregarding the quality and longevity of the product. Paying pennies on the dollar for a BYD vehicle sounds great when all you consider is the initial sticker price. The real cost is what happens after you buy the disposable car and own it for a decade. So yea. Second place is the reality and it is also true for AI models, and the hardware needed to run them. Also, congratulations on landing a rocket 11 years after the US. Took long enough.

jrochkind1 1mo ago

> Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI Nothing paradoxical about it, open source AI use raises demand for nvidia's chips too.

davrosthedalek 1mo ago
And I would say it's actually a more secure future demand channel than the hyperscalers. Openai and co can build their own chips, so they won't buy from NVidia. But they probably won't sell them to somebody else, so everyone who wants to run their own install (and can, not the least because of HF), will buy Nvidia.
dpoloncsak 1mo ago
Locking the next generation of programmers into CUDA
- John7878781 1mo ago
  Translating CUDA kernels to ROCm (or any other ecosystem, tbh) is going to become trivially easy with AI. Not saying that code is the only glue that Nvidia has when it comes to their ecosystem, but it’s certainly a large part of it.
  - tovej 1mo ago
    It's not that difficult at the moment. Don't know why you would need an LLM to translate between two nearly identical language extensions. Optimization is different, but that's not really a translation level task.
    - spunker540 29d ago
      If an LLM can do a rote task for me, I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it
      - tovej 28d ago

nailer 1mo ago

> HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. This is wildly offtopic, but: what's it been like for you? A niche seemingly academic interest in 2016 has exploded into revolutionary practicality. I bet you have some insights and good stories.

cbeach 29d ago

> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation Three French founders set up the company in New York, raised their money from American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) and are now selling to an American chip company for $12.9B. Europe's most successful AI company was only ever European in the nationality of its founders. > the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe Why would they do that? They already moved to America once to build a company. Since then the EU has passed the AI Act (obligations on general purpose model providers in force since August 2025), so the incentive to build the next one in Europe is weaker than it was in 2016, not stronger. Ambitious Europeans have been voting with their feet for decades. The EU could fix this any time it liked by getting out of the way of its own entrepreneurs, but it prefers to write more regulation and then complain about "sovereignty" when the businesses it drove away get bought.

bawana 29d ago
Do the American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia)get a piece of that 12.9B? or most of it?
- saidnooneever 28d ago
  it would be a bit weird if nvidia paid to nvidia but ok

TacticalCoder 29d ago

> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown. There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent. No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's sake. SAP. Let that sink in: the biggest EU software company is ranked 65th biggest company in the world. There's, thankfully, ASML but that's it. > ... which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. Wishful thinking. I don't buy it for a second that it's going to be a "big win". And France is a country that hates its rich with a passion: they'll now be seen as demons, not just for having sold to the US... But simply for being very rich. People have no idea at which point we in the EU are totally screwed. Why would these guys come back to France only to see their wealth confiscated? I certainly wouldn't. Screw the EU.

maleldil 29d ago
No mention to Mistral?
- XajniN 26d ago
  [dead]