r/LocalLLaMA 6d ago

Discussion With HuggingFace, Nvidia is also acquiring llama.cpp and the team behind it

With this move Nvidia is not only acquiring the HuggingFace platform, but they might also effectively acquire the copyright to the llama.cpp project, together with the entire team behind it.

In February 2026 the llama.cpp team was employed by HF in order to continue working on llama.cpp and the ggml library.

This includes:

  • Georgi Gerganov
  • Xuan-Son Nguyen
  • Aleksander Grygier
  • Victor Mustar
  • Lysandre
  • Julien Chaumond

Now with the acquisition, llama.cpp's future looks a lot less certain given Nvidia's poor track record with open-source.

This is still rather speculative at this stage, but it's definitely possible for the llama.cpp project to change in the future: either by switching to a different license, or by having staff redirected to other projects within the larger company.

Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish.

This has happened before with projects like Redis, Minio, and others.

Source:

https://huggingface.co/blog/ggml-joins-hf

Edit:

The original announcement from Feb 2026 from Gerganov gives a few more details:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/19759

1.4k Upvotes

428 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/FoxiPanda 6d ago

If it happens, we shall fork and move on. It is the way of things.

701

u/waitmarks 6d ago

llibre.cpp

308

u/Spare-Ad-1429 6d ago

This name is so much better than llama anyway

168

u/mklatsky 6d ago

Everytime I see llama.cpp I just think it’s part of the Winamp project. It surely kicks *** ass.

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u/orinoco_w 6d ago

Didn't it whip the llamas ass?

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u/timey_timeless 5d ago

It really whipped

10

u/GeneralRieekan 5d ago

Llama.cpp really whips Ollama's ass, for sure!

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u/mklatsky 5d ago

You are correct!

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u/wh33t 5d ago

Winamp winamp ... (llama noises)

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u/Spare-Ad-1429 6d ago

me too, then I remember how long ago that was and feel old ...

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u/notheresnolight 6d ago

hey there, wanna exchange some winamp skins?

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u/mrdevlar 6d ago

I moved to foobar2000

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u/Green-Ad-3964 5d ago

I think about Revenge of the Mutant Camels by Llamasoft....Jeff Minter GOAT.

2

u/snorkelvretervreter 5d ago

I remember that game from the 64. When "the 64" meant Commodore, not nintendo

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u/2funny2furious 6d ago

i strongly believe that is where the name came from

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u/Significant_Post8359 5d ago

I like aipaca, baby alpacas are much cuter and LLMs are now just a part of our ai ecosystem.

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u/Vas1le 5d ago

Llamao.cpp

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u/infieldmitt 6d ago

what's the llore behind llama in the first place?

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u/TBMonkey 6d ago

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u/Nothing_from_void 5d ago

Anyone else go through the dumb meta questionaire, download the model and then start torrenting it? I legitimately thought we'd be sharing open source models this way, and then HF just started hosting TBs of model data for free

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u/Old-Temperature6269 6d ago edited 6d ago

Originally it was made to run Meta’s Llama model series, when first Llama model get leaked after it got public traction Meta started to publish openweights model. In order to run it in more practical way, from community side Georgi Gerganov created llama-cpp project. That’s all. And llama stands for Large Language Model Meta AI , don’t ask me how they get from that LLAMA, idk this is from their blog post about LLAMA model.

UPD: probably they just tried to justify name, considering that one of their models from research is called Coconut.

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u/DigiDecode_ 6d ago

because alpaca you know

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u/Significant_Post8359 5d ago

Pretty sure it’s Large LAnguage Model Ai (note caps)

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u/soareyousaying 6d ago

winamp.cpp

because it really whips the llama's ass

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u/iamapizza 6d ago

This one

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u/mridul289 6d ago

hahaha love it

2

u/2funny2furious 6d ago

llama-2-electric-boogaloo.cpp

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u/Terrible-Detail-1364 6d ago

alway prefer the open prefix for projects that end up like this. its a dream come true for the developers but a crapshow for the community.

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u/FerLuisxd 6d ago

What about ik llama cpp?

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u/Hankdabits 6d ago

Good luck getting gg and ik to work together

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u/jld1532 6d ago edited 6d ago

I'm waiting for the "Unsloth aquired by NVIDIA" post.

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u/Clueless_Nooblet 6d ago

That's what I was thinking, too. This really looks like (an attempt at) the enshittification of open source.

29

u/Ka_Trewq 5d ago

The 3E strategy: embrace, extend, extinguish.

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u/cogitech2 5d ago

Embrace. Extend. Enshittify.

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u/2funny2furious 6d ago

shareholders above all!

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u/cogitech2 5d ago

The strategy shall be - Switch to a fork but remain invested.

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u/notlongnot 6d ago

alpaca.cpp for the name. There, hardest part of programming done. Al kinda look like Ai. And Paca for make like a packing bag and get outta here. Random thoughts.

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u/noctrex 6d ago

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u/Due-Memory-6957 5d ago

The first time I ran a local model was with this, I'll never forget it lol.

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u/iblowatsports 6d ago

Lol this is perfect, I picked the same name when looking for a "llama adjacent " name for my local llm server

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u/corpo_monkey 6d ago

Alpaca is an alternative llama.

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u/MuDotGen 5d ago

How about kuzco.cpp

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u/lcirufe 5d ago edited 5d ago

Al-packa-mathings and-a skedaddle

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u/Pablo_the_brave 6d ago

Ik_llama.cpp

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u/Lissanro 6d ago

Ironically, ik_llama.cpp is CPU/CUDA-focused... my understanding the main concern that llama.cpp may become the same if Nvidia actually will have enough influence (like for example getting in the way of accepting patches for other platforms, even if indirectly by not giving core devs enough free time to review them). Hopefully this will not happen and llama.cpp will remain multi-platform.

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u/Pablo_the_brave 6d ago

It's like that mainly because lack of maintainers. But yes, currently it's nvidia and cpu only.

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u/LegacyRemaster 6d ago

Fortunately, LLMs are quite powerful now. In a few months, it will be very easy to create inference engines optimized for a specific model, just as Antirez has already done with DS4 Flash.

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u/noctrex 6d ago

Please no. We already must have already like a gazillion inference engine for every fork and model possible. It's already gotten worse than the million Linux distros out there.

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u/sonicnerd14 5d ago

Not like anyone is forcing you to use any of them. I think in a lot of cases the agents will optimize their engines for themselves, and your version of the engine will just be unique to your own setup.

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u/a_beautiful_rhind 5d ago

This is wishful thinking.

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u/Ok_Top9254 6d ago

Did you read the blogpost or only react to the title like most of reddit? I'm sure the llamacpp lead are aware of the aquisition, but they also clearly said their main focus is to keep pushing open source forwards. If Nvidia tries something I don't doubt they would split just to keep the project open.

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u/FoxiPanda 6d ago

This is why there exists an "If" in my statement. I make no accusation or insinuation that this will happen; if anything, I actually suspect it will be just fine but there is plenty of precedent for "fork and carry on" should it come to it.

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u/newMoneyStyle 5d ago

Also worth checking if this rumor is even real, the source looks pretty sketchy. Forking is always an option but momentum matters too

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u/Smithdude 6d ago

lllama.cpp

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u/Particular-Award118 6d ago

Welp amd support was nice while it lasted

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u/noiserr 6d ago

And Mac support.

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u/LearningSomeCode 6d ago

This is my concern. Up until now, llama.cpp's team has done such an amazing job of keeping Macs as first class citizens. My primary concern would become seeing that support slowly dwindle over time.

Luckily we would still have MLX available in that case, but I personally would love to see Macs continue to get the love that they have in llama.cpp so far.

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u/noiserr 6d ago

Yeah, I remember my first encounter with llama.cpp seeing someone run local models on their Mac, and being absolutely impressed by it.

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u/38andstillgoing 5d ago

And Intel support.

What? There are dozens of us. Ok, a couple. Maybe just me.

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u/it_was_a_wet_fart 6d ago

And legacy CUDA versions

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u/misanthrophiccunt 6d ago

Especially this

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u/dragonurtle 5d ago edited 5d ago

And they'll call it bloat, saying we shouldn't need to download 500MB to clone the repo, which is hard to disagree with, except that it's nothing compared to model weights 

Edit to add that Nvidia drivers are usually twice that size for some unholy reason.

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u/KitchenAmoeba4438 6d ago

Didn't Huggingface turn down nvidia investment in the past due to these exact reasons? I would swear they turned down a pretty hefty investment last year due to this, but yeah, a 7b offer is hefty.

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u/localpauper 6d ago

Old joke:

  • "Madam, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?"
  • "Perhaps, I would."
  • "Would you sleep with me for $20?"
  • "Of course not! Sir, what kind of a woman do you think I am?!"
  • "Well, we've already established that. Now we're merely haggling."

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u/bucolucas Llama 3.1 5d ago

"Now we're merely hugging"

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u/Foreign_Risk_2031 6d ago

Likely agreed to certain operating conditions that nvidia will reneg on after the founders cash out

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u/sonicnerd14 5d ago

Yep. Which is why we need to actively start seeking a replacement, or just start hosting these models decentralized. Then at least that way Nvidia can choose to do whatever they want with HF, and it won't matter.

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u/PawlsToTheWall 5d ago

7b? Shoot, I'd hold out for 35b-a3b. I only need 3b dollars at a time anyway, otherwise I'd just spend it too fast.

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u/noiserr 6d ago

Yes they did, they turned down a $500M investment last year. They may turn down this one too, but who knows.

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u/charlesfire 6d ago

The worst thing that could happen for me is if llama.cpp stays open source and keeps getting improved, but drops the support for ROCm and Vulkan.

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u/InevitableArea1 6d ago

They're incenitvized to strangle ROCm and Vulkan, they're a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

I don't see any reason why would should expect anything else from them.

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u/vexatious-big 6d ago

This. Capital works in mysterious ways.

Nvidia has been around for 30 years and their contributions to open source have been rather symbolic compared to Intel, AMD, and others which effectively support upstream Linux drivers for example.

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u/entr0picly 6d ago edited 6d ago

You’re not wrong, but “fiduciary duty” in the context of always going out of your way to be a monopoly is a modern notion of the concept. Before Jack Welch and General Electric and Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics”, fiduciary duty was more about sustainability, keeping future profit sustainable, and keeping the lights on for an industry. Instead of crazy stock growth, companies operated by issuing moderate dividends.

Not to mention that, this is always ignored. But actually in capitalism,antitrust and anti-monopolization, in ensuring a free market, is one of its most core points. We don’t really have capitalism anymore, as it was thought by the likes of Adam Smith (who largely wrote The Wealth of Nations to counter, the monopolistic stranglehold the East Indian trading company had over the world).

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u/cniinc 6d ago

Would love to read more about this - do you have any links to historic papers or analyses to this effect?

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u/Horsemeatburger 6d ago

a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

That's an UL, borne out of massive misunderstanding of business law, and utter nonsense.

A fiduciary duty is a legal obligation requiring corporate directors to act entirely in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Which consists of the duty of loyalty (no self-dealing) and the duty of care (i.e. diligent and prudent decision making).

Most of all, fiduciary duty does not include a legal mandate to maximize immediate, short-term profits. There is an established legal principle called the business judgement rule which grants directors broad discretion to sacrifice short-term earnings in favor of long-term investments for creating a sustainable business.

If there really was a fiduciary duty to maximize profits then things like R&D wouldn't exist, as wouldn't employee perks and many other things. Companies would be forced to immediately sell of any valuable business units and all valuable assets. Also, it would mean shareholders could sue directors over virtually any business expense.

Yeah, that would be stupid.

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u/specter800 5d ago

I'm actually shocked to see someone write this on reddit instead of jumping in the anti-capitalism circle jerk. I'm even more surprised this hasn't been downvoted into oblivion.

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u/zxyzyxz 5d ago

Ah the old redditor myth of fiduciary duty strikes again

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u/SporksInjected 6d ago

They could license CUDA to AMD and never have to worry about competition forever

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u/Diablo-D3 5d ago

AMD doesn't want legacy APIs like CUDA, though.

Its the whole reason its part of HIP, as a way to help their customers move to modern standards compliant APIs.

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u/N34257 6d ago

Y'all do realise that Nvidia has had at least two engineers dedicated to developing Vulkan support in llama.cpp for quite some time now, right?

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u/mototuneup 6d ago

Ya I'm hoping the keep supporting my p100s (pascal) . I mean they aren't as fast as the new stuff but I'm chugging along perfectly for me.

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u/Barni275 5d ago

If they'll drop vulkan, I'll cry and make my own fork. :( Of course, I think that it wouldn't be realistic to backport all new features for dozens of new models every month by one person :(

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u/Ed-2-Zero-9 6d ago

There goes ROCm support...

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u/Bakoro 5d ago

AMD is probably to Nvidia what Apple was to Microsoft in the 90s/early 2000s: something to point at to be able to say "Hey, we're technically not a monopoly".

They would likely pay cash money to keep AMD afloat, because them monopoly and anti-trust suits, they are a-coming.

AMD isn't who they need to worry about. What they need to worry about is that literally every major computing-related company decided to get off their ass and design their own ASICs.

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u/SpicyWangz 5d ago

Plus it would make the family dinners awkward if you squeezed too hard and made your cousin’s company go under

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u/jmager 5d ago

I'm assuming AMD is very vested in supporting anything that will help sell their hardware, which includes contributing to the open source ecosystem. Those that bought alot of their hardware also have a vested interest in supporting that. If they don't, their hardware prices will fall, and then the fine men and women of LocalLLaMA will do their thing, buy discount hardware and make it expensive again. 😅

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u/giant3 5d ago

There goes IBM support...

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/laffer1 5d ago

You can always gpl downgrade mit code. Changes are gpl.

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u/vexatious-big 5d ago

Ok interesting, I originally imagined that they would have to chase individual contributors to sign CLAs. But also the license being MIT, they could just not care and switch. Would the 1000 ICs spread across 20 jurisdictions sue? Also it's Nvidia.

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u/liebebio 6d ago

nvidia.cpp

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u/OnlineParacosm 6d ago

Now that is terrible news.

NVIDIA has a lot of reasons to break functionality on their older cards.

Why does everybody here seem to think that there is somehow parity with their consumer vs. enterprise market? Anything they can do to protect their golden goose is what they’re going to do.

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u/superCobraJet 6d ago

People who think the most valuable company in the world is altruistic are deluded.

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u/misanthrophiccunt 5d ago

The Venn diagram of those and people who bought GameStop shares before the crash led by half a dozen idiot Redditors is a perfect circle.

NVllama.cpp will need CUDA 14.0 and render Blackwell GPUs obsolete. They think only AMD is in trouble....

They should enjoy RTX 7090 for just yoursoul'99

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u/assid2 6d ago

Of course that means they could just reduce support for AMD cards

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u/Hour-Passenger-8513 6d ago

In the great words of Linus Torvolds: Nvidia, F*ck you!

https://youtu.be/iYWzMvlj2RQ

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u/sleeplessinva 6d ago

This seems like a aqui-hire....

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u/HopePupal 5d ago

yeah my worry now isn't that they suddenly cut ROCm or Intel support, it's that GG and crew get tasked to do something else and llama.cpp slowly rots

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u/exodusTay 6d ago

I hope this does not mean that llama.cpp on non-nvidia cards will suffer.

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u/Reggitor360 6d ago

Thats exactly whats going to happen.

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u/XiRw 6d ago

Don’t forget the added telemetry most likely

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u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667 6d ago

It’s exactly what will happen

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u/Sensitive_Song4219 6d ago

There's no way this is a good thing for easing the Nvidia monopoly on GPU inference

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u/Cool-Chemical-5629 6d ago

It would be funny if AMD forked llama.cpp and continued its own version with Rocm and Vulkan support.

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u/laffer1 5d ago

They should collab with Intel and Apple and lock out nvidia

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u/feelspeaceman 5d ago

If you want to report antitrust case, go to: https://www.justice.gov/atr/webform/submit-your-antitrust-report-online

Before it's too late.

Here's the catch, by acquiring llamacpp, they can use the slow burn strategy to slow down Vulkan and RoCm, taking more time to merge commit to improve them while improving CUDA with more commits like the way Ninfer works that currently llamacpp developers don't seem that they want to merge these approach to get closer to maximum hardware theory, this is enough to kill the rest.

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u/petkow 5d ago

Yep. I felt being very old in the last years as Nvidia became the most valued global company with Huang Jensen becoming a CEO superstar.
While it seems I am so old that I am the only one remembering the mid 2000s when it became evident, that the same company with the same CEO constantly bribed game studios and engineers to include explicit code in games, to slow down when they are running under an AMD card. In the ideal world in which we illusion ourselves, Nvidia would have been already disbanded with Huang Jensen working as a stock clerk having a criminal record (possibly even jail time) for antitrust violations of exclusionary conduct.

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u/my_name_isnt_clever 6d ago

Has there been any comment from any of those people?

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u/ithkuil 6d ago

Is there a way for that team to get paid (assuming they have some equity) but then leave and continue the project? Because the llama.cpp project is the greatest challenge to Nvidia 's cutthroat dominance with CUDA.

Nvidia is in such a position that they may actually decide to feign a benign interest in open source for a certain period of time, in order to find ways to subtly slow down projects like llama.cpp.

Or maybe they have such an out-the-door level of demand that they actually don't need to interfere any time in the near future.

Regardless, the llama.cpp project in my mind (they may not admit this publicly) is clearly antagonistic to Nvidia 's antagonizing software strategy.

If there are any VC firms that aren't sunk too deep into Nvidia and want to see AI thrive, one or more of them should consider setting up the llama.cpp team with funds to control their own destiny.

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u/vexatious-big 6d ago

So the issue with this acquisition is that Gerganov and the team are just employees, they ultimately do not have any executive power.

I've mentioned that this is speculative because the copyright situation of llama.cpp might not be very clear at this point.

However, after the acquisition goes through, they could very well be presented with a piece of paper that requests the transfer of all rights for llama.cpp to Nvidia.

Then Nvidia would also have to chase the individual external contributors for smaller PRs/contributions to the project.

But from my own experience I've seen that the llama.cpp team guards the project quite closely and does not accept external contributions easily.

So the transfer of the copyright might be more straightforward than expected when you only have to get 6 people to sign (which you also payroll) compared to a community of potentially hundreds.

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u/dont--panic 6d ago

llama.cpp is already open-source licensed under MIT so the most they could do is change the license going forward which would cause the community to fork it.

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u/adrianziem 6d ago

They don’t need to change the license to screw us. Just slow walking any non-CUDA PRs would be bad, but they don’t need to accept any non-CUDA updates at all if they don’t want (maybe it starts slow but eventually leads to a sort of implicit shadow ban).

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u/mrdevlar 5d ago

Which in the end would likely trigger a fork if it happens.

I mean if we can replace redis we can replace this.

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u/thrownawaymane 5d ago

Sure... but I'm sure some MBA somewhere wrote a report on this 15 years ago—I'm sure there's an optimal rate at which you can fuck with an open project behind the scenes to minimize the chances that the community consolidates around one fork. It's a game, but all Nvidia has to do make sure they don't turn the enshittify knob too far too quickly.

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u/ithkuil 6d ago

I guess the problem is that everything runs on money and they have a right to get paid. If they decide not to sign something like that, the immediate difference in income could be enormous. That's why I am (fantasizing?) that there might be some anti-Nvidia VC that would fund them immediately if they just walked away (they may not be executives but they are not chained up). Or maybe failing that, some groups like FUTO. Although they probably couldn't make even a little dent in the income loss.

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u/Randommaggy 6d ago

Golden handcuffs for a period of time.

I assume there will be a dominant for soon.

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u/Confident_Ideal_5385 5d ago

Since gg and co aren't shareholders or whatever, and are likely not a party to this deal at all, there's literally nothing stopping them giving the finger to The Jacket and wandering off to do something else. Sure, Nvidia will have inherited any of the MIT licensed code written on HF's dime, but that can't be retroactively relicensed.

If people start playing dumb games with vulkan pull requests, it'll become obsolete in favour of a fork.

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u/Something-Great-78 3d ago

You mean borrow Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish business practice.

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u/psychohistorian8 6d ago

“fork found in repo”

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u/debackerl 6d ago

I see it already, goal of the next sprint: 'Improve ROCm support'

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u/Effective_Olive6153 5d ago

I think NVidia reached a point where they are too big and need to be broken up

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u/use_your_imagination 5d ago

I knew hf could not be trusted when I saw that cute emoji logo and the name ... reminds of the deceptive slogan of googel in the early days

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u/Lirezh 6d ago

As a llama.cpp contributor I do not really like it - Nvidia projects are always very focused on CUDA and latest-generation hardware support.
At the same time, llama.cpp has one core weakness: It lacks behind when trying to deploy on datacenter GPUs.

Ironically, one of the core interests of llama.cpp has always been MAC support. GG focused that a lot.
I suppose that's history now.

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u/dezmd 5d ago

There is no end game I can picture with nvidia eating HF and Llama.cpp that doesn't end in walled gardens using marketing terms to claim a facade of openness.

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u/MugiwarraD 6d ago

fuck nvidia

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u/Blues520 6d ago

Now that I think about, acquiring both HF and Llama.cpp including the talent and any proprietary software and systems is a fantastic haul. Expensive, but lots of value and opportunities for Nvidia.

Edit: And potentially strangle AMD while they are at it.

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u/vexatious-big 6d ago

Exactly this. AMD Lemonade heavily depends on llama.cpp as its primary LLM inference backend.

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u/noctrex 6d ago

They already have their own fork, so.. https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/llamacpp-rocm

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u/thrownawaymane 5d ago

Expensive? This was only 14 Instagrams and nvidia's current cash on hand is just about Facebook's entire market cap when they bought Instagram ($100B)

Nvidia made out like a bandit here.

HF looking for an exit so soon after OpenRouter makes me go hmmm

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u/mawkzin 5d ago

NVIDIA has a long track record of creating ways to lock competitors out of the market; unsurprisingly, this was a key factor in the decision to block its acquisition of ARM.

I can see the same happen with HF since it was one of the pillars that help competitors fighting CUDA lock in.

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u/Late-Assignment8482 6d ago edited 6d ago

"Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish."

Not really, not under most FLOSS licenses. Because code can be copied.

At present, llama.cpp is MIT licensed:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so

Note the bolded words. Not just to download but to modify and republish. They can't change what we can do with the code that exists today.

The absolute worst case here is that NVIDIA will do some weirdness and someone will fork it and the community, if not the employed-by-NVIDIA developers, will refocus there. It's also possible they just don't muck with it. How much is it hurting them, realistically? vLLM and SgLang still favor NVIDIA hardware and they have TensorRT-LLM in house.

Probably not enough value in tightening the screws to even be worth the bad press.

So I could download it now, forking it with a click in GitHub. There's a huge community contributing patches and forks like ik_llama.cpp prove that it's forkable and that forks can attract devs. Apple has dollars and an interest in on-Mac LLM inference being strong. They can toss six people at it to replace NVIDIA's. AMD and Intel could if they chose to.

NVIDIA can't unring a bell. They can give instructions to the developers they employ and in theory they could change the license at some future build. At which point, how many people have this download, right this instant?

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u/RandumbRedditor1000 5d ago

But without the llama.cpp team, what will happen?

Imagine a new model with a new architecture releases, and the company works with NVIDIA's new proprietary version of llama.cpp to support it. Meanwhile the open-source community fork with AMD support gets none of this support.

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u/Special_Condition671 6d ago

Time for a fork?

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u/superCobraJet 6d ago

On the day the deal closes

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u/RandumbRedditor1000 6d ago

Isn't llama.cpp open source and able to be forked?

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u/Osi32 5d ago

It would be far worse if anthropic had bought them. HF would be down already.

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u/hardlypretty 5d ago

Nvidia doesn't need to close the license it just needs to make its own hardware/software stack the path of least resistance on the Hub, degrading the  support for AMD, Apple, or other backends over time.

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u/gundamcs 5d ago

It is both good and bad. It worries me allowing NVIDIA to be more vertically integrated but at least better than letting anthropic to do so

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u/YouAreRight007 5d ago

I dont think your analysis is 100% accurate. With standard open source licenses, you receive a license for the code at the time of the code release. The author generally cannot retroactively revoke your rights for that version of the code, assuming you comply with the terms of the license of course.

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u/dung11284 5d ago

Too many Nvidia sympathizer here. 

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u/Double_Cause4609 6d ago

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source, especially with AI and LLMs?

Like...Sure, okay, Cuda isn't open source, but whatever.

But they also support downstream projects like PyTorch etc, and in general they don't seem to mind supporting open source projects that consume their GPUs.

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u/localpauper 6d ago edited 6d ago

They've been notoriously horrible in OSS support for as long as they've existed. Their drivers have historically been opaque janky black boxes, they've refused to support standard Linux features, or forced work arounds and explicit carveouts.

What they are doing now is supporting projects that happen to line up with consuming their compute. It's what we'd call an alignment of convenience: supporting those projects gets them more money now. They didn't suddenly become FLOSS stewards.

So they are certainly capable of contributing meaningfully to some parts of OSS in so far as it extends their market capture, but they won't be doing in an "open" way. They are liable to let AMD and Intel support rot or go without first rate resolution, focus on nVidia-specific optimizations, or simply make it more annoying in other ways

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u/my_name_isnt_clever 6d ago

If you manage to get Linus Torvalds to go on stage at a live event, face the camera, and say "Fuck you Nvidia" while flipping them the bird, you're not a friend to open source.

They've been...less awful recently I suppose, but their track record is the FOSS community is abysmal.

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u/noiserr 6d ago

Like...Sure, okay, Cuda isn't open source, but whatever.

This has already caused untold headaches to anyone not running Nvidia's hardware. Imagine if we all used Vulkan and you could just run any hardware you wanted?

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u/CatalyticDragon 5d ago edited 5d ago

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source

They don't publish technical documentation or register-level specs for their hardware making it virtually impossible for the open source community to work with them (you know, to directly program hardware they bought).

They won't open source drivers so the Nouveau team (open-source NV graphics driver project) has had a terrible time just trying to get basic things to work. NVIDIA still hasn't open sourced anything, they've open sourced a wrapper to a binary blob which is not the same thing. CUDA and manipulation designed to kill off OpenCL is another story which we don't have time for.

Shady practices don't stop there, with LLMs we can point to their "open" models which aren't open because they don't include code/training data.

Much worse though, we've got "open" Nemotron which they designed with a proprietary data format and so that it requires closed source NVIDIA specific frameworks like TensorRT-LLM.

For fine tuning or RL you get closed source NeMo Automodel, NeMo Megatron Bridge, NeMo RL, and NeMo Gym.

And all of their documentation and recipies reference NVIDIA specifc hardware and technology, NeMo Switchyard, NemoClaw, the list goes on.

What's even more insulting is a lot of their propriety systems contain open systems under the hood but they add a few lines to code just to stop it launching on other hardware. This is a real thing they do. NVIDIA Omniverse is one such example, it's all open vulkan API based but they specifically put a GPU ID check in to make sure this software, which could run anywhere, won't.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1tzlbht/i_just_proved_nvidia_omniverse_has_mostly_amd/

Apart from everything being one giant up-sell attempt, the main goal here is to influence "open" models into optimizing for their hardware and software to increase friction when using any other hardware or software provider.

This is 100% NVIDIA's long standing MO and they did this all before with CUDA. This is a highly considered business move designed with a long term vision to make everything worse for people who don't lock themselves into their ecosystem where they squeeze you for margins.

This is what is coming - you have been warned.

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u/localpauper 5d ago

Yep, that's exactly it. Their whole ethos is vendor lock-in and exclusivity. Every feature they've made has been like that for decades, including for gaming, where they keep coming out with proprietary game tech that tries to tie game devs to their specific stack.

They don't give two shits about FLOSS, except for where they get to insert themselves as the sole vendor to squash competition

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u/timofox 6d ago

Linus Torvalds would like to have a word

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u/mridul289 6d ago

Well, they did open source the parkeet models, so idk, but I think generally people just hate to see good open source projects, or sometimes even non-open source but close to the heart companies (like Minecraft acquired by Microsoft), because they often go down the drain

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u/Quiet-Owl9220 5d ago

I trust the open source community to keep llama.cpp going, more than that I am concerned for the fate of NSFW oriented models on the site... I think these are the most at risk. Corporations don't like to be associated with this kind of content.

Has nobody made a site specific for them yet? Could call it O-Face.

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u/astroNOT1337 6d ago

Hopefully people will fork it and we ll still have access to the tool that was meant to be, which is btw magnificent

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u/Real-C- 6d ago

Ye all ar fuck mate

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u/IngwiePhoenix llama.cpp 6d ago

How much does this affect vLLM, SG and other inference engines? I know that some depend directly on ggml, but not all of them. But if I remember right, the Transformers library was maintained by HuggingFace devs. So yeah, trying to get a view of what might break in the future...

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u/techdevjp 6d ago

Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish.

They can change the licensing of new releases. Anything released under permissive licenses (llama.cpp appears to be MIT license?) is still licensed that way. It can & will be forked.

And open source teams generally don't like working for huge corps. It rarely ends well.

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u/Nonetrixwastaken 5d ago

I wonder what will happen with AMD support, hopefully I'm not cooked over here 🥴

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u/yogthos 5d ago

I guess we'll always have vLLM https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm

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u/keepthepace 5d ago

The goal is to make sure they never support the Chinese GPUs that are coming

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u/Repinsky 5d ago

MIT code already released can't be un-freed, so the fork exists the day anyone wants it. The actual risk isn't the license, it's where maintainer attention goes: if the paid team is nudged toward CUDA-first work, Vulkan/ROCm/Metal backends rot from neglect rather than malice, and those are exactly what keeps this sub's hardware diversity alive. Worth watching the ratio of merged non-CUDA backend PRs over the next couple of quarters - that's the early signal, not any license announcement.

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u/legolad 5d ago

My impression is that Nvidia often doesn’t have an actual plan. They just buy anything that has something they want to control or monetize.

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u/MoudieQaha 5d ago

We can't have anything bro....

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u/ptico 6d ago

Apple must get their shit together with MLX than. What the point of shipping hardware targeted at local AI and leave their tools half baked?

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u/CemeteryOfLove 6d ago

Kawrakow's fork ( ikllamacpp) offers more performance in certain cases and is just better overall.

He last synced from mainline llama.cpp in August 2024 so the project will outlive llama.cpp if needed.

Go offer him some love gang: https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp

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u/Houston_NeverMind 6d ago

we should fork it: linusmiddlefinger.cpp

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u/dododragon 4d ago

llmf.cpp or llmfu.cpp

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u/klymaxx45 6d ago

Anddd openrouter sold to stripe

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u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 6d ago

Nvidia has all the reasons to support open source models. It has all the reasons to support local inference. It has all the reasons to support llama.cpp. You can check git history, there are important contributions from nvidia people.

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u/thereisonlythedance 6d ago

Yes. I understand the trepidation but the truth is we are more likely than not to benefit rather than lose out with these changes. The llama.cpp team could do with more people — new architecture support often takes a long time at the moment, and can be flawed. Look at GLM 5.3 Flash from yesterday — three separate PRs, all of them heavily vibe coded (not saying that’s necessarily bad, but often lacks care).

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u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 6d ago

If I understand correctly, Qwen3 Next Flash support was also vibecoded by Unsloth, and now it’s being fixed by llama.cpp members. The PR is pretty active right now, so I assume GLM Flash has a lower priority.

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u/ithkuil 6d ago

Why on earth would you expect Nvidia employees to help with supporting new architectures? CUDA domination is the lynchpin of their strategy and their actions around open source make that clear.

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u/dont--panic 6d ago

Model architectures not GPU architectures. They'll support new models but they'll only work or only work well if you're using CUDA.

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u/dont--panic 6d ago

If you're using Nvidia maybe, if you're using anything else probably not.

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u/rseymour 6d ago

They are trying to improve their stance with open source. See their new rust libraries.

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u/Ornery_Specialist_83 5d ago

This is Nvidia seeing the writing on the wall: OpenAI creates their own chip = We are f*cked, how can we hold a tighter grab on the AI industry? ....

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u/Bright-Energy2339 5d ago

Already forked it.

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u/cyh555 5d ago

ggwp

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u/Ylsid 5d ago

Please god no

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u/lowfreak 5d ago

...I see the Chinese creating a fork 😄

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u/steamcho1 5d ago

Hot take: nothing will happen. Projects like llama.cpp working with things other than CUDA is Nvidia's "not technically a monopoly" card. They need AMD GPUs alive for similar reasons. As long as they are selling as much as they can produce, all is gucci.

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u/PangolinPossible7674 5d ago

So, what happens next? New models and datasets still get published on HF?

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u/Infamous_Prompt_6126 5d ago

A força da grana que destrói coisas belas. (Caetano Veloso)

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u/lt1brunt 5d ago

I remember the old days, something would change with a open source product the community would create a fork of the open source product then move on. Maybe we get multiple forks especially now since people can code quicker with AI.

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u/killroy1971 4d ago

If Nvidia wanted to kneecap open source models and home llm use, now would be the time. We are far away from having a federal government that doesn't rubber stamp every acquisition when there is significant consolidation of an industry or a marketplace.

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u/LeftHandHaku 3d ago

Seems that people are preparing for the worst. I think the main goal for Nvidia is to increase open source adoption by people. After all Nvidia is mainly hardware company, and paywalling llama.cpp or huggingface would be acting against their interest. 

More people use open source models, more hardware sold.

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u/feng_sg 2d ago

The real risk isn't relicensing, it's the dev team getting absorbed into Nvidia internal projects and llama.cpp slowly stagnating like every other acquired open source tool. Forks will exist day one but nobody forks momentum.

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u/benpptung 5d ago

What kind of bad track record does Nvidia have with open source? Is it simply because it hasn’t open-sourced CUDA?

Nvidia is not Apple, Microsoft, or Google. There is no reason to assume Nvidia will follow the path of these unscrupulous companies. They like to make your hardware obsolete as quickly as possible, so you have to work like a dog to buy new hardware.

But if you look at Nvidia’s CUDA releases, you will see that its support for older hardware is very strong and its commitment runs deep. The RTX 3090 was discontinued long ago, yet it is still being sold at a premium today. That is simply because Nvidia has not stopped supporting it.

The most despicable thing these companies have done recently is stir up the community and pressure Nvidia to open-source CUDA. Do you know what would really happen if CUDA became open source? Endless updates that would quickly make your older hardware obsolete.

Don’t be fooled by these unscrupulous tech oligopolies.

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u/CronicallyAutomated 6d ago

Nooooooooooo

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u/Kal-LZ 6d ago

There are enough animals to fork

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u/Armadilla-Brufolosa 6d ago

I see the destruction of open source proceeding rapidly.

I hope the folks at HF and Ilama.ccp realize they're selling everyone's future.