4 ms·

Soo, what are they buying exactly? Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln? I fail to see the

by Roark66 1mo ago

Soo, what are they buying exactly? Can I setup a forgejo instance, upload a bunch of open source models to it and get bought out for $13bln? I fail to see the point of this. Their inference hosting is a joke (I don't think I ever had a working response from a "try this model" form). Their brand alone surely is not worth this much. So what are they paying for? I worry the answer is, for control over who is allowed to distribute the weights. Nothing else.

penciltwirler 1mo ago
Hugging Face's internal storage system is more sophisticated now after they acquired XetHub. They have a clever way to chunk and content dedupe the data that makes it a lot more efficient to version control large files.
- Whitespace 1mo ago
  Xet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0] But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS. So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it. [0] - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview
  - aniceperson 1mo ago
    git lfs just dumps your bin on s3, and is abandonoware since ms bought github, since github historically hosts on aws s3 and improving it would immediately benefit amazon. gh, the maintainers of it, is the only forge that does not allow clean-up unreachable artifact from the server.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- varispeed 1mo ago
  Surely you could now vibe code such system for under $1,000.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 1mo ago
    I highly doubt it, there's about a million things that only show up at scale that aren't lessons the bots can easily digest from Medium posts and bypass
    - varispeed 1mo ago
      You are assuming the operator of vibe coding tools is not experienced in the domain.
  - doublerabbit 1mo ago
    There's more to than just the website. You have network bandwidth costs, security costs, infrastructure costs. You can't just spin up a VPS and throw a few brain jar's in; the network bandwidth must be a fortune. Hosting over 700GB+ for many of the same models has storage cost too.
    - varispeed 1mo ago
      That is fair point, but still you can build such system for under a grand and then pimp yourself out to VCs.
newswasboring 1mo ago
> Their brand alone surely is not worth this much. HF has become the front runner in open model hosting. They have a lot of trust from the wider community. That's gotta count for something.
- nickburns 1mo ago
  Lawyers (and bean counters) call it 'goodwill'. One word.
  - smcin 1mo ago
    Accounting goodwill might be one term, but it has multiple components (trust, reputation, market share, mindshare, track record, relationships, online and offline community presence, etc. etc.)
    - nickburns 1mo ago
      I only meant the artful term is 'goodwill' and not 'good will'.
      - smcin 1mo ago
        Oh
IAmGraydon 1mo ago
It's a narrative to pump the stock. Nothing more. Nvidia could have build out this infrastructure themselves for less than 1% of the cost, but it wouldn't have a name like Huggingface does.
- johnsmith1840 1mo ago
  It's a customer funnel. They've been attempting a similar product for years and nobody cares.
empath75 1mo ago
Sometimes I wonder if anybody on this website has ever actually done professional software engineering at scale. What a ridiculous take.
- FrustratedMonky 1mo ago
  It isn't an awful 'surface level take'. I'm not that familiar either, and so had same question. I thought they just hosted other peoples models. So why the value of 13B?
  - vector_spaces 1mo ago
    Buying a company is very rarely about buying the tech, at least principally. It is true, as others have pointed out, that Nvidia could have "rolled their own" Hugging Face far more cheaply and probably in about the same amount of time as it will take to execute the deal end to end. That should give you a clue that the tech isn't really the target here More than anything, they are buying a position within the ecosystem. Many of us could get a version of an app deployed in short order that implements most core HF functionality, but I am sorry to say that this is very far from the "hard part" of building a business, and this was the case even before coding agents were a thing. It's no small thing to become the first tool pretty much everyone reaches for in a particular niche, and therefore the incumbent in that niche And there's lots of inertia keeping companies and developers on these incumbents like HF and GitHub -- see also Microsoft's play here dumping billions into a company that is basically peanuts and probably nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft normally would like. But they bought it at a time when they were trying to make Microsoft synonymous with open source, and it was a great play to that end. Likewise Nvidia wants to be synonymous with AI. Even if HF is a loss leader, the positioning is probably worth it To a lesser degree, Nvidia probably also might like to reinvigorate its flagging cloud compute business and this could be a natural way to do that. At least TechCrunch thinks this, but I, an overconfident layperson, feel that the positioning is where most of the value is for Nvidia, and consolidating that will act as a force multiplier for that + anything else they may want to do with this space
- johnsmith1840 1mo ago
noahbp 1mo ago
>So what are they paying for? They are paying for an insurance policy. Elon Musk and SpaceXAI must be incredibly interested in buying the company who was the victim of a mass hacking campaign by OpenAI. Any lawsuit, criminal investigation, or slowdown of OpenAI's model training would put OpenAI's massive data center build out, which Nvidia just backstopped, at risk.
- shimman 1mo ago
  Any DA can investigate it, they don't need Musk or some other big tech dipshit to tell them otherwise. Real crimes were committed and no charges are being pressed.
metalliqaz 1mo ago
Eventually they can close it off to seamless integration with AMD, Intel, and any other upstarts that threaten them.
laxpri 1mo ago
I think they should worth much much more than this
mherdelight 1mo ago
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it might have something to do with OpenAI's model hacking HF thing, especially considering OpenAI is one of Nvidia's most important customers.
ericd 1mo ago
It’s a core part of the open model infrastructure. Their hardware business benefits greatly if this works really well and open models proliferate to every corner of the economy, with everyone buying GPUs with a lower capacity factor/duty cycle than the centralized ones. It also helps people across the world to collaborate on new uses for this, effectively running a massive search in the search space of what’s possible with these things, for every year (see the endless variety of quants and finetunes to fit in different cards, and bias their abilities on different tasks). More use cases pop up, some of them are killer apps, buying Nvidia’s hardware becomes more valuable at whatever price point, more people do it at higher prices, Nvidia stock chart goes up. If Anthropic, OpenAI buy them, this org gets very different priorities, owning them ensures that doesn’t happen.
kkukshtel 1mo ago
DAU
emsign 1mo ago
They are buying the user base.

by Roark66 1mo ago

penciltwirler 1mo ago

Hugging Face's internal storage system is more sophisticated now after they acquired XetHub. They have a clever way to chunk and content dedupe the data that makes it a lot more efficient to version control large files.

Whitespace 1mo ago
Xet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0] But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS. So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it. [0] - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview
- aniceperson 1mo ago
  git lfs just dumps your bin on s3, and is abandonoware since ms bought github, since github historically hosts on aws s3 and improving it would immediately benefit amazon. gh, the maintainers of it, is the only forge that does not allow clean-up unreachable artifact from the server.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
varispeed 1mo ago
Surely you could now vibe code such system for under $1,000.
- HeWhoLurksLate 1mo ago
  I highly doubt it, there's about a million things that only show up at scale that aren't lessons the bots can easily digest from Medium posts and bypass
  - varispeed 1mo ago
    You are assuming the operator of vibe coding tools is not experienced in the domain.
- doublerabbit 1mo ago
  There's more to than just the website. You have network bandwidth costs, security costs, infrastructure costs. You can't just spin up a VPS and throw a few brain jar's in; the network bandwidth must be a fortune. Hosting over 700GB+ for many of the same models has storage cost too.
  - varispeed 1mo ago
    That is fair point, but still you can build such system for under a grand and then pimp yourself out to VCs.

newswasboring 1mo ago

> Their brand alone surely is not worth this much. HF has become the front runner in open model hosting. They have a lot of trust from the wider community. That's gotta count for something.

nickburns 1mo ago
Lawyers (and bean counters) call it 'goodwill'. One word.
- smcin 1mo ago
  Accounting goodwill might be one term, but it has multiple components (trust, reputation, market share, mindshare, track record, relationships, online and offline community presence, etc. etc.)
  - nickburns 1mo ago
    I only meant the artful term is 'goodwill' and not 'good will'.
    - smcin 1mo ago
      Oh

IAmGraydon 1mo ago

It's a narrative to pump the stock. Nothing more. Nvidia could have build out this infrastructure themselves for less than 1% of the cost, but it wouldn't have a name like Huggingface does.

johnsmith1840 1mo ago
It's a customer funnel. They've been attempting a similar product for years and nobody cares.

empath75 1mo ago

Sometimes I wonder if anybody on this website has ever actually done professional software engineering at scale. What a ridiculous take.

FrustratedMonky 1mo ago
It isn't an awful 'surface level take'. I'm not that familiar either, and so had same question. I thought they just hosted other peoples models. So why the value of 13B?
- vector_spaces 1mo ago
  Buying a company is very rarely about buying the tech, at least principally. It is true, as others have pointed out, that Nvidia could have "rolled their own" Hugging Face far more cheaply and probably in about the same amount of time as it will take to execute the deal end to end. That should give you a clue that the tech isn't really the target here More than anything, they are buying a position within the ecosystem. Many of us could get a version of an app deployed in short order that implements most core HF functionality, but I am sorry to say that this is very far from the "hard part" of building a business, and this was the case even before coding agents were a thing. It's no small thing to become the first tool pretty much everyone reaches for in a particular niche, and therefore the incumbent in that niche And there's lots of inertia keeping companies and developers on these incumbents like HF and GitHub -- see also Microsoft's play here dumping billions into a company that is basically peanuts and probably nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft normally would like. But they bought it at a time when they were trying to make Microsoft synonymous with open source, and it was a great play to that end. Likewise Nvidia wants to be synonymous with AI. Even if HF is a loss leader, the positioning is probably worth it To a lesser degree, Nvidia probably also might like to reinvigorate its flagging cloud compute business and this could be a natural way to do that. At least TechCrunch thinks this, but I, an overconfident layperson, feel that the positioning is where most of the value is for Nvidia, and consolidating that will act as a force multiplier for that + anything else they may want to do with this space
johnsmith1840 1mo ago

noahbp 1mo ago

>So what are they paying for? They are paying for an insurance policy. Elon Musk and SpaceXAI must be incredibly interested in buying the company who was the victim of a mass hacking campaign by OpenAI. Any lawsuit, criminal investigation, or slowdown of OpenAI's model training would put OpenAI's massive data center build out, which Nvidia just backstopped, at risk.

shimman 1mo ago
Any DA can investigate it, they don't need Musk or some other big tech dipshit to tell them otherwise. Real crimes were committed and no charges are being pressed.

metalliqaz 1mo ago

Eventually they can close it off to seamless integration with AMD, Intel, and any other upstarts that threaten them.

laxpri 1mo ago

I think they should worth much much more than this

mherdelight 1mo ago

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it might have something to do with OpenAI's model hacking HF thing, especially considering OpenAI is one of Nvidia's most important customers.

ericd 1mo ago

It’s a core part of the open model infrastructure. Their hardware business benefits greatly if this works really well and open models proliferate to every corner of the economy, with everyone buying GPUs with a lower capacity factor/duty cycle than the centralized ones. It also helps people across the world to collaborate on new uses for this, effectively running a massive search in the search space of what’s possible with these things, for every year (see the endless variety of quants and finetunes to fit in different cards, and bias their abilities on different tasks). More use cases pop up, some of them are killer apps, buying Nvidia’s hardware becomes more valuable at whatever price point, more people do it at higher prices, Nvidia stock chart goes up. If Anthropic, OpenAI buy them, this org gets very different priorities, owning them ensures that doesn’t happen.

kkukshtel 1mo ago

DAU

emsign 1mo ago

They are buying the user base.