Let me try to make the point clearer:
1. Investors expect Huggingface to extract more than $100M from the market. Otherwise they'd be called 'donors'.
2. If they openly publish models, then their APIs will be undercut by other providers who can take the published model and host it for cheaper. It would be cheaper for other companies because: they don't need to pay the cost of training the model, and they can specialize in simply hosting models.
3. Because of 2), Huggingface would need to avoid allowing other companies to host models, including internal APIs (because then providers would simply spin up to making hosting those internal APIs easy).
4) Because of 3), their policy of publishing trained models openly has to change.
So the question that the original poster was asking is: what Huggingface policies will change, given the need to make returns on this investment?
The original poster is likely thinking of OpenAI, which went down a similar route (starting training open models, took in a bunch of money, realized that openly publishing them wasn't sustainable, kept the models secret and created locked down APIs for accessing them).
> So if you want someone to answer precisely how they'll extract hundreds of millions of dollars from an emerging market, I have to imagine this isn't the correct forum to expect such answers.
This market isn't new; Google, AWS, OpenAI, etc. all have APIs they charge for. They also have services to host trained models for you. How will Huggingface make money without resorting to hiding its models?