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Comment by asadm | Hacker News Reader

They will be acquired. Either by Google or MS.

Why Google (who has their own AI stuff) or MS (who has a hand in OpenAI) and not, say, Samsung?

Branding and trust. ML folks love HF, and rightly so. They have great software libraries, host everyone's models, generally great UX all around. They do a great job of making it easy to do cutting edge stuff, while still making it possible to do bleeding edge stuff. They appeal to basically all ML folks in a way few other companies do.

Google could grow GCP by more deeply integrating HF into GCP, I think, while retaining as much of the HF brand and interface as possible.

Big friction point might be ethics, since HF is still seen as the "good guys" and where some folks who left Google over ethical concerns landed.

MS makes sense since they could integrate it with github and azure into an ML platform that they could sell to their enterprise consumer base. It would also be a great addition to teams, bing and word suite.

MS has already invested $10B in OpenAI, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.

Google has poured hundreds of million into Anthropic due to Eric Schmidt, so they aren’t going to be a buyer.

Meta?

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are not a replacement for huggingface. Which has complete monopoly on model hosting right now.

Monopoly is a stretch. Half of the models I try come direct from GitHub (and almost 100% of all model code comes from GH too).

Hosting binaries isn't really a stable business model.

But the weights are all on HF no?

No that's what I was getting at. For roughly half the models I come across, the weights are published on HF. For the other half, the weights are available via GitHub (either the releases section, or a link to something like Google Drive).

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