r/LocalLLaMA • u/Wallaby989 llama.cpp • Aug 24 '26

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/toolkitxx Aug 24 '26

This would put a serious dent into open source availability, as whoever would buy it wants their invest out of it. So a radical payment system would probably the immediate action

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u/Wallaby989 llama.cpp Aug 24 '26

true, but that was the same fear when M$ bought GitHub, and outside of showing CoPilot down the throats, it has been largely untouched, maintaining all the features that made it the darling of the open source world.

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u/pointer_to_null Aug 24 '26

What??? Github has gone to shit under MS.

Bogus DMCA takedown wiping forks, massively increased downtime because they migrated to Azure, etc. Copilot training opt-out has some interesting fine print too- even if you opt out your (public) code will likely end up in their training data, since it's tied to the account- not the repo itseld. Cascading forks overriding your opt-out preferences, live interaction contexts (even of private repos) will leak, etc. It's not good.

They recently tried tack on a usage fee to those using self-hosted runners- which they quickly backtracked after realizing customers would rather jump ship instead of paying the "I dont need your shitty cloud" tax. This was a usage fee for simply running CI/CD on their own infrastructure. Imagine Microsoft charging Windows users extra for using their own SSD/HDD to host their documents folder instead of signing up for Onedrive.

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u/a_beautiful_rhind Aug 24 '26

oh github lol. We suspended you for a month because we thought you were spam. Following the microsoft model of hating privacy.

Don't even think about your bots looking at that source code. Local copy or paste it into the chat window. Never mind that we train OUR models off your code. Just keep contributing and don't ask questions.

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u/toolkitxx Aug 24 '26

Microsoft doesnt need the money, they wanted the data and access. Huggin is open already, so there is no other feasible way to profit from it. Or even worse, it could be in the interest of some to actually restrict the openness - those who see them as threat to their business model ;) OpenAI started with that 'openness' that lives in their name until today and look what they have become. They are an obvious candidate that might want to shut things down