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These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature o

These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature on the founders/board.

alexpadula 1mo ago
Maybe they approached, tried to work together but then got bought out? Very common.
- sealthedeal 1mo ago
  I watched their CNBC interview this morning with Hugging Face CEO and Jensen. HF CEO specifically said they went to Jensen and said they wanted to join forces. Obviously more elegant lol.
chews 1mo ago
I don’t think many realize how hard it is to raise for a no revenue company that isn’t buying out large GPU contracts and racking machines. They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations. To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.
- willy_k 1mo ago
  > To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.
  - slowin 1mo ago
    What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.
    - retinaros 1mo ago
      Selling pro accounts for storage. Its at best a few ten millions arr maybe 100-150
    - fennecbutt 1mo ago
      Data. Loooads of data for Nvidia. And an audience.
      - slowin 1mo ago
        I don't think they have much data, they host the (open) models but I don't think they're getting any logs from users or anything like that. I don't believe they monetize data either. I also suspect Nvidia has a much larger audience than Hugging Face.
    - artyomsv 1mo ago
      Revenue is the small part of it though. Every training and inference script in the ecosystem imports their client library and pulls from their hub by default, so they sit on the default path between a model and the machine that runs it. For company that sells the machines, owning that default is worth more than any subscription line.
  - dragandj 1mo ago
    I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.
- sealthedeal 1mo ago
  Agreed. Take a ~$13bn buyout im sure cash and stock is the smartest thing to do for a company their size and age. Take the profits now and keep building securely. I imagine their employees very much gotten taken care of. Jensen mentioned an additional $1bn in cash compensation etc to keep employees at HF.
irthomasthomas 1mo ago
Overheard: "It would be a shame if Hugging Face had to press charges for hacking against your best customer. Perhaps if I was busy counting my money, it might slip my mind."
- himata4113 1mo ago
  I doubt that would go anywhere, but this is a very funny joke regardless!
- syngrog66 1mo ago
  it was also yet-another-huge-reward to those who took part in a big publicity splash (ie. win) for an AI biz: OpenClaw guy: rewarded by acquihire Bun compiler Zig-to-Rust rewrite guy: rewarded by acquihire HuggingFace "hacked" by "rogue" AI: rewarded by acquihire

These Hugging Face guys made out like BANDITS!!!! Good for them. My favorite part is they approached Jensen for the buyout. They knew, very smart and mature on the founders/board.

alexpadula 1mo ago

Maybe they approached, tried to work together but then got bought out? Very common.

sealthedeal 1mo ago
I watched their CNBC interview this morning with Hugging Face CEO and Jensen. HF CEO specifically said they went to Jensen and said they wanted to join forces. Obviously more elegant lol.

chews 1mo ago

I don’t think many realize how hard it is to raise for a no revenue company that isn’t buying out large GPU contracts and racking machines. They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations. To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.

willy_k 1mo ago
> To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.
- slowin 1mo ago
  What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.
  - retinaros 1mo ago
    Selling pro accounts for storage. Its at best a few ten millions arr maybe 100-150
  - fennecbutt 1mo ago
    Data. Loooads of data for Nvidia. And an audience.
    - slowin 1mo ago
      I don't think they have much data, they host the (open) models but I don't think they're getting any logs from users or anything like that. I don't believe they monetize data either. I also suspect Nvidia has a much larger audience than Hugging Face.
  - artyomsv 1mo ago
    Revenue is the small part of it though. Every training and inference script in the ecosystem imports their client library and pulls from their hub by default, so they sit on the default path between a model and the machine that runs it. For company that sells the machines, owning that default is worth more than any subscription line.
- dragandj 1mo ago
  I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.
sealthedeal 1mo ago
Agreed. Take a ~$13bn buyout im sure cash and stock is the smartest thing to do for a company their size and age. Take the profits now and keep building securely. I imagine their employees very much gotten taken care of. Jensen mentioned an additional $1bn in cash compensation etc to keep employees at HF.

irthomasthomas 1mo ago

Overheard: "It would be a shame if Hugging Face had to press charges for hacking against your best customer. Perhaps if I was busy counting my money, it might slip my mind."

himata4113 1mo ago
I doubt that would go anywhere, but this is a very funny joke regardless!
syngrog66 1mo ago
it was also yet-another-huge-reward to those who took part in a big publicity splash (ie. win) for an AI biz: OpenClaw guy: rewarded by acquihire Bun compiler Zig-to-Rust rewrite guy: rewarded by acquihire HuggingFace "hacked" by "rogue" AI: rewarded by acquihire