Hugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse.<p>Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace?<p>Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.
I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)
throwaway since since i used to be affiliated with them.<p>HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.<p>While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.
Genuine question … What business are you in when selling AI/ML?<p>I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”.<p>And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML?<p>Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell?<p>To use an analogy, if you’re selling AI/ML, are you in the IaaS industry, PaaS industry, SaaS industry (or something else?)
ML models are the new apps. There is a huge opening for an App Store type situation which enables people to buy models and integrate them into their products, handling the appropriate licensing.<p>Bonus points for certifying the models actually do what they say. That by itself will probably become a mini industry.<p>Hugging Face are the clear leaders in terms of having mindshare in the community to be able to build it.
From Nvidias point of view, this might be an investment in their own business via network effects rather than a straight up investment in Hugging Face. I hope so, because when the VC money goes, the billing will go through the roof.
1) What do they want with all that money?<p>2) How in the world are they going to pay it back?<p>They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.
Confusing Pricing.<p><a href="https://huggingface.co/pricing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://huggingface.co/pricing</a><p>I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.
Oh. When I last read about it I thought it was meant to be sustainable.<p>I hope the founders take their share home and have fun burning the rest. At least hopefully some open software/AI models will have come out of it when the company collapses under its own weight.
Congratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative.<p>What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.
I don't know what this could ever do that isn't easily reproducible with a tiny fraction of that investment. Fragmentation of communities is an absolute given in software.<p>Added to the fact that of they get too dominant they'll get leveraged out of the supply chain and I'm not sure what the value proposition is here.<p>I mean obviously I'll be wrong but it's hard to not be skeptical
The real question is why the company doesn't use .ml as a domain name alias.<p>Edit: dang, guess HN strips out emojis from posts. The Punycode version of the Hugging Face emoji on a relevant TLD supporting emoji domains would be <a href="http://xn--zp9h.ml/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://xn--zp9h.ml/</a>
Isn't it a bit funny that Nvidia puts money into a company that is going to spend a large chunk of that capital right back at Nvidia.<p>I wouldn't be surprised if there is little to near zero risk for Nvidia with this bet.
Really, throughout the entire funding process no one raised the similarity of "Hugging Face" to "Face-huggers", the larval name for the Xenomorphs from <i>Alien</i>?