Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

Avicebron

tldr: the marketplace for opensource models became wide open

sbinnee

This is huge!

Gigachad

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

jadar

Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.

freelanddev

the title of this post is misleading… “in talks” != not “agrees”

bensyverson

I hope they're good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.

user-

Its becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.

aizk

Fix your title it's not finalized yet!

riddley

Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?

novia

um um um um do we want nvidia to be on the same network as hugging face given the recent incidents?

vmg12

The companies have aligned incentives so I don't think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.

browningstreet

I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.

louwrentius

I really wonder why Nvidia would do this.

rjzzleep

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.

manlymuppet

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.

petterroea

I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

manlymuppet

What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?

sourdecor

What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?

andy99

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.