Comment by andy99
6 hours ago
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
6 hours ago
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
I think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know.
I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago.
I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field, one of the most responsible orgs in our space. They've been a pillar of open source ML for years now and have made a very positive impact on our ecosystem.
Nvidia is getting a real business generating revenue, and the center of the universe for open models. Both seem like pretty valuable attributes, from Nvidia's perspective.
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This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.
Risk management.
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation.
Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.
If their stock moves up more than third of percent due to this they have won... The math at these valuations get somewhat extreme. But there is some logic in it.
> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
Why would Nvidia destroy the first place we all look for models to load on our Nvidia hardware?
for 6 months?
https://huggingface.co/pricing
I don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why?
This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate.
Google is obvious.
Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
9 replies →
They make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere.
Possibly, but they were profitable already.
This. They are buying a brick in the xkcd #2347 diagram