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Comment by chews | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think many realize how hard it is to raise for a no revenue company that isn’t buying out large GPU contracts and racking machines.

They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations.

To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.

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Agreed. Take a ~$13bn buyout im sure cash and stock is the smartest thing to do for a company their size and age. Take the profits now and keep building securely. I imagine their employees very much gotten taken care of. Jensen mentioned an additional $1bn in cash compensation etc to keep employees at HF.

> To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely

At the frontier companies, but not for hugging face or nvidia. Their business are going to be around for a while considering how local models are performing now.

What is hugging face's business? I thought they were just free model hosting.

Selling pro accounts for storage. Its at best a few ten millions arr maybe 100-150

Data. Loooads of data for Nvidia. And an audience.

I don't think they have much data, they host the (open) models but I don't think they're getting any logs from users or anything like that. I don't believe they monetize data either. I also suspect Nvidia has a much larger audience than Hugging Face.

Revenue is the small part of it though. Every training and inference script in the ecosystem imports their client library and pulls from their hub by default, so they sit on the default path between a model and the machine that runs it. For company that sells the machines, owning that default is worth more than any subscription line.

I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.

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