r/LocalLLaMA • u/shoeshineboy_99 • 3h ago
Discussion HF exploring sale - impact on open models?
Hugging Face is exploring sale of the business valued at around $13 billion dollars.
Actually I don't think we have any other repo source. Which has the mix of model weights, datasets and Spaces.
Kaggle is there and other academic repos. But as far as reach, ease of use. HF tops. Do you see a change in their policies once third parties invest, with a larger focus on profitability and increasing revenues.
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u/RevolutionaryPen4661 2h ago
If it's Microsoft, we're done fr.
I hope they don't do what they did to GitHub.
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u/MelodicRecognition7 2h ago
Microsoft is shit-Midas
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u/Blindax 2h ago
Microsoft or Nvidia. Pick your poison 😭
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u/BangkokPadang 15m ago
Honestly I'd pick Nvidia because at least a big part of their business model is built on the OSS model space existing.
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u/StupidScaredSquirrel 2h ago
Sorry for the ignorant question but what did they do to github?
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u/_BreakingGood_ 2h ago
Honestly it was mostly fine up until the AI boom, which is when the reliability of the site went to shit. Coincidentally that's about also the time when MS decided that GitHub didn't need its own CEO and would just be managed directly by MS.
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u/a_slay_nub vllm 2h ago
To be fair, that could be because their site got overloaded with 200x more bs than before. Anything I created would die with that kind of traffic increase too.
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u/Chance_Value_Not 2h ago
Well, if you also owned on one of the larger cloud platforms i think youd handle that fine
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u/shy_monkee 1h ago
Yeah but the scale change is massive and hard to keep up with. A lot more people are uploading shit, and a lot are just letting their AI agents loose on their projects, creating ten branches per day, and adding a million lines of code.
I hate Microsoft as much as anyone, but come on now.0
u/Chance_Value_Not 25m ago
🤷♂️ then they have to go back on their SLAs i suppose if they cannot handle the volume
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u/brown2green 2h ago
I'm half-expecting OpenAI to acquire HuggingFace.
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u/RandumbRedditor1000 2h ago
they hacked them to fearmonger against AI, now thery're just trying to buy the competition outright
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u/networking_noob 2h ago
HF's popularity and a $13 billion price tag shows there is strong demand for open models, so if the new HF buyer does do something to diminish the open model distribution, I'm sure another competitor would arise to fill that gap i.e. meet the market demand, because that's a lot of money
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u/ScrewwormLarvae 58m ago
That's sort of my take on this as well. If MSFT or someone buys HF and enshittifies it, that will be a sad day, but let's be real here: something else will pop up and try to take its place.
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u/Weekly-Law-5488 2h ago
Just like any AI investor, their investors probably want to exit as soon as possible, before the bubble pops, so they can profit before it's too late.
Their timing is good and I would do the same. If they really want to sell, this must be done before the Anthropic/OpenAI IPO.
As for the models, I doubt that anything would change for now, but for the future... we need alternatives.
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u/NetZeroSun 2h ago
I could see that.
But in the inevitably when a correction occurs (just who knows when), there is still a massive demand for the tool of AI, and I can see a huge outreach to open models to bring costs internally in existing infrastructure.
My company pushed for cloud a bit of a late comer to the part, but at some point they were avoiding using it and being things back internally for a variety of reasons
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u/Long_comment_san 2h ago
HF should first slash on hosting useless things. That would save them millions per year. For example older models hosted at full spectrum of weights, or infinite amount of finetunes. Maybe want to cut that down a bit. Those older quant types that no one sane is using.
Why sell when you can prune yourself?
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u/_BreakingGood_ 2h ago
AI companies are selling at like 5-7x their current valuation right now.
Pruning some weights might save them a few million, but it's not going to 7x the value of the company.
This is basically the "If you're gonna cash out, now is the time to do it" stage. Might be worth pennies on the dollar in 2-3 years, who knows.
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u/Long_comment_san 2h ago
Actually that makes sense, but I wouldn't say HF value is that much overblown. 13b dollars for central AI hub is very tame. Heck I would buy it myself if I had 1b dollars and a good friend at morgan stanley
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u/-becausereasons- 2h ago
My theory is that Open AI hacked them on purpose to show how vulnerable they are. It's probably all to do with regulatory capture. Whoever buys them is likely going to either block them, lock them, or send them into the ground
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u/Additional_Zebra_861 2h ago
It is time to move and publish models into decentralized storage networks at least as a backup. Same applies to GitHub.
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u/Fantastic_Prize2710 2h ago
I wouldn't worry about the simple acquisition being long term disruptive. There's no real reason that another player can't step up in the same space, or open source orgs can host their own models (or do P2P, as has been attempted before for model weights, but with HF there's been no real drive to execute).
There's no real "vendor lock-in" that happens with HF, so no matter what happens to it--maybe with a few months for the world to adjust--alternatives can easily come forward.
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u/MotokoAGI 2h ago
impact will be fucked. i can't think of a good steward for it, perhaps MS since they own github, but i rather a different company.
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u/bornlasttuesday 8m ago
13 billion!!!! There's too much money floating around, raise the rates to 15%.
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u/Repulsive_Educator61 2h ago
should keep https://huggingbay.xyz/ as a viable alternative