alt Hacker NewsNvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
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Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.
That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.
Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.
I hope nvidia does right by the community.
Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D
Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.
Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.
The more interesting is HF turned down a $500M Nvidia investment late last year at a $7B valuation, after passing on a $235M round in 2023 at $4.5B — going from "we don't want a dominant investor" to a $13B full acquisition in under a year is quite the reversal.
Remember just 6 months ago that "Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088037)
(Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.)
Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more "Open AI" than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...
I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.
I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.
HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.
If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?
It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.
This is the world we live in now. 3-4 megacorps owning everything in every major product category - eyewear, cosmetic, consumer goods, media, tech; you name it.
I really hope they retain and pay Georgi Gerganov. We are toast without ggml.
I remember when people realized gaming cards could be used for general compute (GPGPU) on certain types of parallel numeric work. It was a very cool thing for many types of hackers and science and engineering students and NVIDIA went far out of their way to ensure we could never buy it.
The optimal market strategy there (as in a lot of places) wasn't "sell as much as you can". There's often a superior strategy, when (as with HPC) you have minority industry customers who are very rich and have low price sensitivity. It's to raise the price to what those special customers are willing to pay, and to drop everyone else.
What NVIDIA did was to rip out FP64 capability, systematically, from all of their consumer cards. They firewalled off "useful for GPGPU" as a differentiating feature, segmented the market, and astronomically raised the price of what (if you were looking soley at cost-to-manufacture) could have been easily affordable to any ramen student.
(It's a more obscure version of the Intel-made-ECC-memory-disappear story).
See, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068890 ("15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern (nicolasdickenmann.com)")
I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?
The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.
I hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.
NVIDIA had more open-source models on huggingface than any other company. A lot better them than any other frontier lab, tbh.
stripe buys openrouter. nvidia buys hugging face. everyone on the hunt for the app that will function as hub/broker/search/marketplace for models.
Monumental implications on OS models. Proper investment in US OS incoming? HF has the best possible distribution to that audience
Congrats to the team. I have a strong feeling this will go down in history as one of the last great exists before the bubble bursts.
12-24 months from this acquisition will likely look like a crazy burn of capital and cash.
They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.
As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.
Like some other folks, I wonder whether this will be a good thing, or a bad thing.
I feel like if Nvidia ends up turning into a bad actor, in terms of restricting/censoring models... another HF will spring up.
Not good news and in the long run this circular move will fail for them. What are the alternatives?
welcome nvidia :)
The lowest hanging fruit that hf could offer is community monitored commands for running local models.
Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.
Brilliant replacement of http://build.nvidia.com to increase developer reach and deployment of nvidia open models!
What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?
Great for Nvidia. Bad for the rest of us. Oh well, so much for hugging face.
Looks like owning the hardware wasn't enough and they want to own the ecosystem as well
Huggingface sold out. Sad day. All the good companies lose their 'dont do evil' clause as soon as they make bank
No, what? Did they just do this to make Chinese models harder to acquire outside of China?
Boy, there sure is a lot of money flying around...
First they came for all the dev tooling - uv, Cursor, etc. Now the routers and providers - Open Router, Hugging Face...
Who or what is next? And what is the endgame I wonder??
What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?
That's a great news for a few rich wallets and bad for all of us.
Monumental implications on OS
We keep talking about EU having to be more present in the AI race, but if the lifecycle of European AI companies is to be bought by US ones, what’s the point?
I wonder if OpenRouter being acquired was a catalyst for this deal.
I'm puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they're releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.
But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it's only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don't align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.
Best case scenario
So is the next step to just basically create a cloud business.
they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?
I'm more worry than positive tbh.
Its becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.
Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.
Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.
Wow, nice strategic move and price seems a bit low tbh. Good deal.
HuggingFace offers abliterated/uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the "AI is too powerful for regular people" narrative that the big players are pushing.
My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated/uncensored models on HF.
Big Wolf buying the sheep farm. Nice
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.