alt Hacker NewsI'm regularly amazed that HuggingFace is able to make money. It does so much good for the world.
How solid is its business model? Is it long-term viable? Will they ever "sell out"?
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Their business model is essentially the same as GitHub. Host lots of stuff for free and build a community around it, sell the upscaled/private version to businesses. They are already profitable.
They have paid hosting - https://huggingface.co/enterprise and paid accounts. Also consulting services. Seems like a pretty good foundation to me.
>Will they ever "sell out"?
Oh no, never. Don't worry, the usual investors are very well known for fighting for user autonomy (AMD, Nvidia, Intel,IBM, Qualcomm)
They are all very pro consumers and all backers are certainly here for your enjoyment only
I once tried hugging face because I wanted I worked through some tutorial. They wanted my credit card details during the registration as far as I remember. After a month they invoiced me some amount of money and I had no idea what it was. To be honest, I don't understand what exactly they do and what services I was paying for, but I cancelled my account and never touched it again. For me that was a totally intransparent process.
FT had a solid piece a few weeks back: "Why AI start-up Hugging Face turned down a $500mn Nvidia deal"
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/9b4eca...