"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."
This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated.
I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or market share or even a productive team. However, in this new age of the surveillance state ...
America is headed towards techno zaibatsu economy.
Just a product of the dynamics of capital and power. Too much cash, Nvidia is forced to try and find ways to deploy excess capital very quickly. Most efficient way is to absorb players in emerging industries, bet on the potential for growth in new markets to help keep ROI up.
It is a great day for startups, the goal is to sell out and get rich, no?
INB4 China comes in and dismantles the American zaibatsus in 2245 like America did to Japan in 1945.
We simply need to bring back that 90% federal income tax bracket we had in the 1950s. If we had the same tax policy today, a CEO or investor would be limited to 5 million dollars a year in earnings. This is what fixed everything.
If a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, cutting staffing, and outsourcing; all of it stops. That was the secret of affordability. Don't let a thousand rich people own everythjng. Tax them so we can have millions of working millionaires instead of 900 non-working billionaire elites.
As those 1950s taxes and post 1929 financial regulations were cut in the following decades, the wealth inequality that led to the great depression has returned.
This is more a result of Clinton's failed CEO pay reform. It is what created this monster, not the tax bracket. Now, saying that, we DO need to tax these people higher. Eliminate all the ways they're able to squirm out from paying a fair share.
Marginal tax rates are meaningless because, even in the 1950s, the system was complex and can be gamed.
If you want to judge the net effect of tax policy over time, look at the percentage of GDP captured by federal receipts (the vast majority of which are taxes). In the U.S., it's averaged ~16.5%-~17.5% with occasional spikes and dips. Currently, it's very close to what it was in those 90%-marginal-rates 1950s.
I disagree on this. It's not the wealth that is the issue, it's the corruption that allows wealth to be converted into power. Citizens united is so backwards that it actually encodes the corruption as a right.
People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.
People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.
We want to encourage private business > limiting liability for owners who do not participate in the business would increase access to capital > we offer corporate forms that shield investors from liability > identity of owners may be kept confidential.
People complain about the wrong thing. The problem isn't that people are allowed to support candidates with their money, buy airtime, etc.. It's that companies have secret owners...
You said "People" a lot in your post. Corporations are not "people".
Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates.
Corporations can lobby, as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute.
They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to lack of enforcement.
If it's okay for Corporations can run ads themselves, then your objection isn't to wealthy people supporting candidates or even them doing so secretly, but... only when the little guy pools donations and they happen to be pool donations via a corporation?
I'm against anything secret about spending on political campaigns.
Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.
PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.
Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.
In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.
No, state's cannot e.g. discriminate on the basis of race by allowing corporations only composed of certain races. States also cannot infringe on the right to assemble or speak, by prohibiting people from supporting political candidates when they are organized as such a group.
But, generally, yes. States can require that the owners / members / corporate books / etc. of a company be disclosed publicly. If owners don't want their books disclosed, then they can forego the immunity that the corporate forms provide.
> People complain about the wrong thing. The problem isn't that people are allowed to support candidates with their money, buy airtime, etc.. It's that companies have secret owners...
This was a major crux of Colbert’s “our lady of perpetual exemption” bit. People absolutely know about the shadowy machinations CU enabled. The lack of transparency is a major critique.
I wouldn't say CU enabled it. CU didn't address the secrecy of corporate forms. That wasn't at issue. CU was only about ~"Can people use money with their friends to support a candidate."
To say that repealing CU is the solution is to allow the critique to go unresolved, while arguing ~"People shouldn't be free to support political candidates."
> People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.
Individuals printing signage is not where most of the funding is going though, is it?
> People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.
This isn't how most of the money is being spent either, is it?
I don't know how you seem to either believe the point of the right to free assembly was to give richer corporations more sway, or be completely oblivious to the fact that that is what's actually getting people angry, not the fact that citizens want to stand with signs by the street corner. Assuming you don't have a conflict of interest leading you to that conclusion, I... don't know what to tell you.
I think your objection is fairly clear in terms of 1) you point out the difference between e.g. standing with a sign vs. more expensive options, and 2) you say "right to free assembly was to give richer corporations more sway."
Fundamentally it sounds like your complaint is that wealthy people are presumably more able to be effective with their efforts than folks who, e.g. can't afford as big of a bullhorn.
Citizens United wasn't about that. There wasn't a law saying no person shall spend more than $1k/yr supporting a candidate.
This is a completely inhuman and unamerican take. Money buys secrecy, it always has. Money is a tool, exercising speech is a right. For the Supreme Court to equate them is ahistorical, plutocratic, and terrible. You sound like you support giving corporations the right to vote as well,
Where do you draw the line between money and speech? IE, would you "simply" ban all political advertising completely - one can scream from a soapbox and that's it?
What is a corporation but people? Companies are groups of people. They're one or more owners, some managers, possibly some staff. If you take away all the people, then there's nothing there.
Democracy is built on the idea that people are equal and have equal rights. This is only sustainable if the power differential between people isn't too large.
Corporations consist of people, yes, but the power to control where the efforts of these people are directed is concentrated on very few people, giving those people a large amount of power -- so large that without any checks on their influence on government, it undermines democracy.
It's the same argument for why super-wealthy individuals are so problematic. They're literally destroying the fabric of democracy through the power imbalance afforded by their wealth.
Assets, mind share, etc. All the things that get sold off in bankruptcy proceedings.
A railroad company also has a huge amount of steel roads with cross country right of ways. You could fire everyone, and it'd still be extremely valuable. It might even be more valuable.
Even in asset-lite software land, "Atari" the name still has a lot of value, even though none of the people are there anymore. They own the right to control the things that the neurons in millions or billions of people's brains are tied to, that their habits tie them to.
Twitter, you can fire almost everyone, make the online square less pleasant for a lot of the people, the network effects truck on. People continue to use it even as they hate using it, because most everyone else is.
A corporation is a liability and pseudonym shield.
A corporation having contribution rights multiplies the otherwise imposed contribution limits on the underlying humans.
A corporation allows tax planning opportunities not afforded to the bottom 90-ish percent of the country (such as shifting income to alternate years to avoid progressive taxation, and utilizing expenses to lower that income in ways a W2 cannot)
Corporations are granted benefits that people do not get, and CU disturbs the balance of power.
Legally, the corporation itself is similar to a person and has rights unto itself, as stupid as that sounds. Those rights are different from those the individuals who run the company have.
We have the techno-feudalism and dystopia but none of the cool aesthetics from cyber punk or arguably even the real Zaibatsu. Nvidia isn’t cool, there’s no interesting aesthetics or back story, it doesn’t appear to have zaibatsu ambitions, it’s just riding a meme stock bubble.
In a different world I can imagine SpaceX to be the only thing that could come close, but well...
Nvidia is hedging their bets against becoming too dependent on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the hyperscalers as their only customers. If on-prem deployments of open models starts taking off in corporate America, this acquisition positions them well.
Nvidia really is best positioned to benefit from the AI wave. They are the main provider for GPUs to the cloud-based LLM companies, and their GPUs are still preferred for local models as well.
> This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated.
I was puzzled by the comments on the openrouter acquisition saying "they're just a proxy" - they're an open marketplace where models compete head-to-head, they're quite a bit more than just a proxy.
Hugging Face has essentially become github for model repositories and I think nvidia wanted to snag that before microsoft does.
They run a proxy for LLM providers, which inevitably creates a marketplace. They’re amazon.com for tokens.
The flip side that others are pointing out is that Amazon is sticky because there’s a sprawling, physical logistics apparatus underneath. You can’t replicate amazon.com’s business without billions of dollars and a decade of building warehouses.
I don’t see where OpenRouter has that. As far as software goes, theirs doesn’t seem particularly tricky. LiteLLM does vaguely similar things, at least for organizations where managing accounts isn’t absurd overhead.
They were first, and there’s money to be made there, but what’s stopping someone else from building LibreRouter that charges a 3% or 4% fee instead of 5%? That’s where I get dubious of their valuation.
... and there is some of that two-sided market effect that (1) people who want to publish a model will publish on HuggingFace and (2) people who look for models will look at HuggingFace. Even if HuggingFace is poorly run in the future it will be hard to dislodge.
Just because a huge company could replicate an OR or HF replacement, doesn't mean by any measure that users will abandon OR/HF and flock to the mega-corp equivalent. In fact even the opposite-- users might be turned off and reticent to even try the mega-corp's..
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T, and so far today the stock is up almost 10%, so that's another $500B. Paying $13B for HF is chump change to them.
NVidia have been making lots of moves recently towards supporting open weight models and local AI, and it makes sense for them to buy HF who support the same, if for no other reason than to prevent someone else like Musk buying them just to shut them down, although I assume they have plans to do a lot more than just keep HF alive.
First mover advantage. The first big company with the most customers stays the de-facto leader of that industry/product. Later OpenRouter and HF will start building moats to keep their customers from easily leaving. That's why everyone's still on GitHub despite it blowing chunks every week. Too painful to move.
Github definitely extended git to a far less technical audience than basic git came from. Emailing patches or connecting to others' remote hosts to pull changes was too much complexity for many customers.
Pull requests, CI platform, authentication that is not PAM etc.
Is that any of that something that cannot be easily replicated?
A lot of work maybe, and required a vision to do so initially. But straightforward work that MS could easily do it, and of course other small companies have replicated it too.
I think a close analogy is Github. The base infrastructure is open source and replicable, and still there's a virtuous cycle that keeps people choosing it over the alternatives.
OpenAI recently committed multiple felonies against HuggingFace.
Nvidia is heavily invested in OpenAI, recently guaranteeing a datacenter buildout up to $105 billion dollars.
Any reasonable criminal investigation into OpenAI's actions or negligence into this incident would hurt their reputation, their ability to raise money, and therefore Nvidia, who is invested in them.
If I was a founder of HuggingFace, I am immediately getting in contact with Elon Musk and SpaceXAI, and letting him know how that he can purchase them and sue OpenAI, this time with solid claims.
If I was particularly amoral about if I think OpenAI or Anthropic should get to AGI first, I would take this bid to Nvidia, whose entire stock price is propped up by OpenAI's over-purchasing of compute.
Don't see this happening. Both Nemo and TensorRT from Nvidia are heavily invested in low precision formats and higher inference throughput as well as low memory use. It's more about what happens in relation to GGUF, MLX and non CUDA-native frameworks/formats.
I really, really doubt that, and I'm a bit surprised (not too surprised, HN has gotten really cynical) that this is the top comment. I think the future nvidia most doesn't want is a small number of closed labs that run away with it, and gain power to steer a large part of the hardware spending towards nvidia's competitors, as leverage in pricing negotiations for big hardware buys. Their ideal would seem to be lots of competition in the model space, driving lots of innovation in lots of areas, at low margins for the model makers, driving use and demand for hardware way up. They want the portion of the economy working on this to go up, and that's not going to happen if there's just a few companies that can afford to build models.
VC funding (much of it from big tech). They have a freemium model and offer some pay for enterprise features, really just private repos, permissioning, etc. but not sure if it is meaningful
The history of acquisitions mothballing the acquired assets or moving them off their original mission or letting them atrophy is too stark to support your optimism. Especially when nvidia has a direct incentive to to steer the ecosystem. For example are they going to highlight and surface alternative chip designs like grok? Or will model search mysteriously not find related models?
Nvidia doesn't exactly have Oracle's reputation when it comes to acquiring companies, but given its overall hostility towards competition and open source I can't blame people for being anxious about the news.
The most important resource for self-hosting LLMs is now under the control of a company that has very markedly kept the specialized hardware outside of the broader public's hands.
You're probably right. It was mostly hyperbole, but the older I get the more I think hyperbole does eventually come to pass in situations like this. It's gradual, though, not all at once.
Natural log cynicism and any cynicism about public corporations in our late-stage capitalism world is likely to look tame a year later. Or possibly too.
I see this as NVidia placing 50% of their bets on local models as the future, which it seems may be more profitable to them than cloud (sell 100/whatever local cards, which see 40hr/week max utilization, vs one cloud card seeing 24x7 utilization).
NVidia seem like a smart company - if they want to promote this direction they are not going to cripple it by trying to limit quantized models, even though you might expect them to promote benchmarks showing the benefits of larger and less quantized ones.
It's like the smart Intel of old - support CPUs all all price points, while also promoting CPU hogging applications like OpenCV.
Ex-NVIDIA employee here who worked on inference software. When it comes to inference software and models, NVIDIA's strategy is advancing the state of the art in the open model realm. They are building software and services business for those markets that need to be competitive on their own merits, and quantization and precision tuning are techniques they use themselves constantly.
Unlikely, but say goodbye to uncensored and abliterated models.
These acquisitions are not healthy. They stifle competition and make it easier for governments to censor open weight models by choking off distribution points.
Also very silly prediction given this would dramatically lower the amount of models hosted on HuggingFace and move users elsewhere to platforms that do support quantized models (not what Nvidia wants).
Yeah. I want to be optimistic, but this feels a lot like how there used to be multiple video hosting sites and now there's just YouTube (and its copyright filters).
"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."