Openrouter and huggingface both sold to multi billion dollar entities in the same few weeks - perhaps this is great for the founders, but as a consumer I hate this acquisition loop that happens with every company of adequate size these days.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.
Is the fact that Nvidia is also massively financing the closed-models companies, which stand to lose when open model project(s) take off, a conflict of interest here? I can’t tell if this is nvidia hedging or planning to embrace & extinguish.
I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market
Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.
Huggingface, llama.cpp and all European frontier. Congrats to Huggingface Team, that amount is tempting but nowhere near your real evaluation. You were about to blow up and there is no AI bubble (just not enough infrastructure like energy and hardware to process current and exponential inevitable growing tokens). Huggingface is bringing the real value to AI community, all the rest is more like scalping IMHO. Nvidia is a great company but not opensource friendly by historical doings. Today is a sad day for the community. Put a timer 2 year from now and mark this words: Huggingface is the free foundation, get what you can today.
Outdated take. Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips. Keeping the backbone of Oss model delivery afloat seems like it would sell more chips.
Let’s not forget to give credit to his family office. High net worth individuals don’t just personally do things like make investments themselves. They hire experts to do that.
Sure, at some point Kevin Durant made the high-level decision that he wanted to invest in high-growth startup companies. But there’s a very low chance that he’s working the day-to-day of that process.
I’d put it close to zero. He was likely presented with the deal once it was sourced and reviewed by his investment team, who likely did 100% of the work. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make the final decision, but pro athletes dont have time to do much investing work beyond high level networking and approving deals.
Its a s3 wrapper. Can be replaced by a wordpress with torrents too. But they built an ecosystem around it and some libs/content. i guess thats what nvidia value
Discussed last week at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458161
Openrouter and huggingface both sold to multi billion dollar entities in the same few weeks - perhaps this is great for the founders, but as a consumer I hate this acquisition loop that happens with every company of adequate size these days.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.
Maybe they approached, tried to work together but then got bought out? Very common.
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.
Not sure why this is news again this week when it was already announced previously. NYTimes was also reporting this like it was news today.
Wasn’t official
In related news, Voyager has left the solar system!
Further, they launched a second probe. First!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
Sure, but that’s the case for basically all acquisitions.
Unfortunately not all deals go through. Like Wiz + Google, or Figma + Adobe. A lot can go wrong between “in talks to acquire” and “acquired.” The official announcement is less surprising but still newsworthy.
Um, Google did actually acquire Wiz in March.
I meant the first attempt in 2024, which fell apart: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/google-wiz-dea...
Because it's a new blog post with new information
Is the fact that Nvidia is also massively financing the closed-models companies, which stand to lose when open model project(s) take off, a conflict of interest here? I can’t tell if this is nvidia hedging or planning to embrace & extinguish.
no, it's not a conflict of interest to invest in multiple companies who compete with each other.
Nvidia is among the best positioned if open models win.
Theoretically, can Nvidia direct Hugging Face to sue OpenAI now for the hack? Surely they could find some interesting stuff in discovery :)
I was also theorizing that part of their acquisition was to get more intel on that, though I feel like in practice that whole thing right now is just theatre for inflating the cybersec market
There was this summery about it, not sure how you'd need more intel - the technical details of the attack are ephemeral
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
The OpenAI web page on the Hugging Face incident is so slick that it basically confirms that the entire incident was a marketing exercise.
It’s obvious that designers and other content specialists spent multiple days crafting this page.
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...
the last thing nvidia would want is to make ai look more legally risky
to say nothing of their massive investments direct and indirect in openai
Yep. In fact, eliminating that risk on OpenAI's behalf was probably a small factor in the acquisition
Why would they sue OpenAI, openai is their one of biggest customer.
why would they sue their client ?! what does that say to all their other clients ?
Clients sue other business partners all the time, that doesn't mean they stop working together. There's lots of examples of this.
no they don't - not when the lawsuit would affect the demand for the thing they're selling
I suspect there are very few examples of it when they are as entangled and invested in them as Nvidia is in OpenAI.
Why would they sue one of their most important customers?
Not to mention that they own a 10% stake in OpenAI
Happy for the hugging face team. Many great folks there who’ve waited patiently for HF to find a business model, and finally they get something even better.
Hugging Face has an identity problem. It needs a gestalt therapist to take it back to where it was meant to grow up.
Where was it meant to grow up?
They approached Nvidia to start the conversation. I guess sometimes great companies are sold, not just bought.
$12,930,300,000?
Hugging face emoji = HTML entity 🤗
(https://x.com/calebfahlgren/status/2095516397879152851)
Huggingface, llama.cpp and all European frontier. Congrats to Huggingface Team, that amount is tempting but nowhere near your real evaluation. You were about to blow up and there is no AI bubble (just not enough infrastructure like energy and hardware to process current and exponential inevitable growing tokens). Huggingface is bringing the real value to AI community, all the rest is more like scalping IMHO. Nvidia is a great company but not opensource friendly by historical doings. Today is a sad day for the community. Put a timer 2 year from now and mark this words: Huggingface is the free foundation, get what you can today.
Outdated take. Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips. Keeping the backbone of Oss model delivery afloat seems like it would sell more chips.
> Nvidia now open sources whatever will make them sell more chips
Oh what did they release?
Yes, also feel this is a massive underpricing.
Another investing W for Kevin Durant, who is likely producing better returns than most VCs while being a full-time athlete.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kevin-durant-investment-portf...
Let’s not forget to give credit to his family office. High net worth individuals don’t just personally do things like make investments themselves. They hire experts to do that.
Sure, at some point Kevin Durant made the high-level decision that he wanted to invest in high-growth startup companies. But there’s a very low chance that he’s working the day-to-day of that process.
I’d put it close to zero. He was likely presented with the deal once it was sourced and reviewed by his investment team, who likely did 100% of the work. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make the final decision, but pro athletes dont have time to do much investing work beyond high level networking and approving deals.
I don't really understand why the AI equivalent of Maven Central is worth 12.9 billion dollars but maybe I'm an idiot.
Network effect.
Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+
Its a s3 wrapper. Can be replaced by a wordpress with torrents too. But they built an ecosystem around it and some libs/content. i guess thats what nvidia value
Life changing for engineers having joined a few year ago. Congrats
Dupe.