Comment by manlymuppet
4 hours ago
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.
Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.
I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.
Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
> I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
You can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there's no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth
Interesting ideas, maybe the real open alternative will indeed be torrents.
Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.
Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.
Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.
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True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.
Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.
The Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.
We're entering consolidation
> 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.
The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.
Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.
Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production.
Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.
Why would China want to crash the AI industry? Their goal is not to damage the United States, necessarily. Their goal is to have the best domestic AI on the planet. They intend to do that through the way that they dominate every other industry: good enough quality at a much greater scale.
If we survive, that is.
That means we will torrent these ai models. They are not pirated so there's no problem doing so
Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?
I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible