| ▲ | Gigachad 5 hours ago |
| What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform. |
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| ▲ | ggcr 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Here is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1] > We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...] I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers... [1] https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1928050126498713706 |
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| ▲ | andy99 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position. |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | vgeek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know. | |
| ▲ | calebkaiser 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | abrookewood 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Can someone help me out - who pays for things on HF? Are they charging the model providers? | |
| ▲ | jameshart 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 150 million a year? Why, at that rate NVidia will make their money back in just 86 years. | | |
| ▲ | calebkaiser 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Solid point. I'm sure Nvidia went into this deal expecting completely flat growth and no other benefits to their core business. Sorta like how Meta never increased Instagram's revenue from $0 and is still waiting for it to pay off that billion dollar acquisition price. Or like GitHub, which was generating something like 200 million in ARR and had never hit profitability when Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion back in 2018. I'm sure it has come as nothing but a happy surprise to Microsoft that GitHub generated $1 billion in 2023. They had initially penciled it in for 38 years til ROI. |
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| ▲ | lotsofpulp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude. |
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| ▲ | NortySpock 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | zx8080 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | | | |
| ▲ | jdejean 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://huggingface.co/pricing | | |
| ▲ | abrookewood 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why? |
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| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free | | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | calebkaiser 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Pretty nice dangling side features apparently. | | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue | | |
| ▲ | calebkaiser 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off". | |
| ▲ | Mistletoe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Absolutely none of this makes sense and the thing that amazes me is how long it has continued. Future historians will just laugh at how stupid and obvious the crash was. | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just wait until you hear that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was generating no revenue. | | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | While it's probably easier to say this in retrospect, they were eliminating a direct competitor to their core business. Something so advantageous it should have been blocked by regulators. I can't see this as being as good of a purchase, especially when it's 13x the price of what was seen as an absurdly large amount back then. | | |
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| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Whether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's |
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| ▲ | ks2048 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | siliconpotato 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This. They are buying a brick in the xkcd #2347 diagram | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Possibly, but they were profitable already. |
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| ▲ | dragonwriter 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things. |
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| ▲ | raincole 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :) |
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| ▲ | dylan604 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | alex1138 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It hugs your face |
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| ▲ | RachelF 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I guess we may have to start paying to download models. Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users. I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic. |
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| ▲ | sebmellen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware. | | |
| ▲ | toyg an hour ago | parent [-] | | So much this. It's like Apple buying Shazam or any other software company, they do it to bring value to their hardware platform. |
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| ▲ | dragonwriter 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs. | |
| ▲ | a_wild_dandan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent? | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors. Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with. | |
| ▲ | esseph 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity. |
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| ▲ | 0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it's literally the GitHub for AI |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Github was acquired for $7B. It's hard for me to see how HF is worth almost double Github. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent [-] | | GitHub was acquired for 10B in 2026 dollars. And software on HF requires quite a bit more hardware expenditure to run. |
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| ▲ | itemize123 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| ondemand cloud? b2b? |
