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HanClinto

I'm regularly amazed that HuggingFace is able to make money. It does so much good for the world.

How solid is its business model? Is it long-term viable? Will they ever "sell out"?

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FT had a solid piece a few weeks back: "Why AI start-up Hugging Face turned down a $500mn Nvidia deal"

https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/9b4eca...

sounds very interesting, but even though it says giftarticle.ft, I got blocked by a paywall.

https://archive.is/zSyUc

To summarize, they rejected Nvidia's offer because they didn't want one outsized investor who could sway decisions. And "the company was also able to turn down Nvidia due to its stable finances. Hugging Face operates a 'freemium' business model. Three per cent of customers, usually large corporations, pay for additional features such as more storage space and the ability to set up private repositories."

Freemium seems to be working pretty well for them—what’s the alternative website, after all. They seem to command their niche.

find the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension. Never worry about a paywall again

They have paid hosting - https://huggingface.co/enterprise and paid accounts. Also consulting services. Seems like a pretty good foundation to me.

and a lot of traction on paid (private in particular) storage these days; sneak peek at new landing page: https://huggingface.co/storage

Their business model is essentially the same as GitHub. Host lots of stuff for free and build a community around it, sell the upscaled/private version to businesses. They are already profitable.

This is what Sourceforge did too, and they still had the DevShare adware thing didn't they?

GitHub is great -- huge fan. To some degree they "sold out" to Microsoft and things could have gone more south, but thankfully Microsoft has ruled them with a very kind hand, and overall I'm extremely happy with the way they've handled it.

I guess I always retain a bit of skepticism with such things, and the long-term viability and goodness of such things never feels totally sure.

>Will they ever "sell out"?

Oh no, never. Don't worry, the usual investors are very well known for fighting for user autonomy (AMD, Nvidia, Intel,IBM, Qualcomm)

They are all very pro consumers and all backers are certainly here for your enjoyment only

These are all big hardware firms, which makes a lot of sense as a classic 'commoditize the complement' play. Not exactly pro-consumer, but not quite anti-consumer either!

heliumtera is being sarcastic.

I once tried hugging face because I wanted I worked through some tutorial. They wanted my credit card details during the registration as far as I remember. After a month they invoiced me some amount of money and I had no idea what it was. To be honest, I don't understand what exactly they do and what services I was paying for, but I cancelled my account and never touched it again. For me that was a totally intransparent process.

Their pricing seems pretty transparent: https://huggingface.co/pricing

Sounds like a personal skill issue

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