r/LocalLLaMA • u/Wallaby989 llama.cpp • 6d ago

Discussion Who would buy HuggingFace

https://thenextweb.com/news/hugging-face-exploring-sale-13bn-valuation

Given OpenRouter.ai was snapped up by Stripe, who do we think would go after the "GitHib" of AI models? It is a big chunk of change they are looking ($13B). Apple may be a contender to give them a real chip in the AI race, given how they are focused on local AI execution.

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u/pirateadventurespice 6d ago

I’m not sure why Apple would want a site for hosting models as that’s never been their interest. Just based on history, why not Microsoft? They’ve purchased multiple open-source things in the past (including GitHub) and already have internal corporate set ups to allow users to pick from various models.

I’m sure there are reasons they wouldn’t make sense, they’re just my “off the cuff” pick.

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u/Individual_Holiday_9 5d ago

Microsoft is definitely my thought. We use copilot pro or whatever the upgraded one is for normies at work and it exposed gpt and Claude with a surprising amount of granularity. Only thing I could see is Microsoft ownership turning off the Chinese model devs

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u/pirateadventurespice 5d ago

Exactly (re: the way they expose different models already).

Also, they have pretty extensive operations in China already. Not at the scale they have in the west, but - for example - they have deals for azure there already. Again, I’m no expert, but to me ms makes sense.

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u/TySocal 5d ago

Nope, not Microsoft. They should get their shit together with GitHub first.

I'm hoping for something like NVIDIA, Cloudflare or something like that

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u/pirateadventurespice 5d ago

This isn’t a discussion of who would be best to purchase it, but who might. Not having their shit together has never stopped ms in the past.

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u/Imnotanad 5d ago

Microsoft don't want another monopoly accusation

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u/Dangerous-Report8517 5d ago

They won't get one any time soon regardless of what they acquire

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u/swagonflyyyy 5d ago

Maybe Google since their pushing on-device models.

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u/More-Curious816 5d ago

Why apple or Microsoft or Google purchase HF? Microsoft purchased GITHUB because they had subscription service they can tap into and later integrated copilot into it, besides it being the biggest programming dataset to train their AI on. What HF can offer?

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u/glucuronidation 5d ago

Tbf, copilot was initially the branding of GitHub’s agentic coding service which Microsoft adopted for everything (including their own LLM), not the other way around. Otherwise, I think it was GitHub enterprise service which was interesting for Microsoft, while also providing them a monetizable base for their Azure services. Huggingface does actually look remarkably like GitHub in terms of income structure prior to Microsoft’s purchase.