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Comment by warthog | Hacker News Reader

It is crazy to me that it is still 100x the ARR at this stage. I think for Deel, it as around 12x

To add further, i do not know what is end goal of hugging face. 1. They have inference API but all cloud provider can implement those in next year. 2. They offer subscription but market-size of subscription is questionable. 3. I hope this new set of funding don't bring problem to them because making money with open source is hard and at this scale of funding it might be even harder. It see what happens in next set of years.

1. Raise $$$ 3. Spend $$$ 4. Exit w/ $

Take money off the table, that’s what all the startup gurus call it, but whose money is kinda the question. Have pension funds stopped chasing VC funds etc?

The companies that invest have products (or have other investments with products) that have a strong market - they end up increasing the price of products to cover the purchase of acquisitions and losses. This results in inflation and worsening wealth distribution.

The article is quite clear on whose money it is - "Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures".

For at least half of them, it might make sense to simply sponsor accelerating worldwide new AI product development because those new products will increase sales of their hardware and services; pitch in $20m together with others to support efforts like Huggingface, while expecting that their tools will indirectly cause an extra $1b sales for you in the next few years.

>Have pension funds stopped chasing VC funds etc?

Yes, they have. Higher bond yields (compared to 0% three years ago) is causing pension funds to shift their allocation away from "alternative" investments (vc & pe), so it has become harder to raise a new VC fund these days.

Probably the same as most privately funded tech startups 1) Gain user base 2) Take investment funding 3) Sell and make the people at the top rich 4) Repeat.

I suppose the argument would be switching costs -- what stops any cloud provider from being interchangeable with another?

GitHub for ML models? If they can anchor themselves to the open-source developer network, their acquisition value is in a tech giant being able to cross-sell to that community.

Are they going to spend that money recreating Code Host features like PRs, code scanning, CI?

I'm not going to host my code on multiple platforms, pretty easy to make a model available for download with S3

Buying a lottery ticket is buying a dream. You too can raise like this if you sell a dream to people with deep pockets who will only be mildly perturbed when it goes bust.

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