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Comment by willy_k | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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