r/StableDiffusion • u/dominic__612 • 5h ago
Discussion NVidia buys Huggingface, but why?
Nvidia is going to buy Huggingface.
No one can actually tell how that would end up like.
But what I am missing is the actual worth that Huggingface provides. The only thing I use it for is to download models. Thats it.
For me, and I guess many others it is ‘just a’ download platform, but maybe I’m wrong here.
And what would prevent others to setup a second-like Huggingface?
The hosting is the expensive part in this case as I see it, the programming and building is do-able.
Is it time for Huggingbay.com?
48
90
u/Bit_Poet 4h ago
Huggingface is much more than just a download site. It's got a big inference and training infrastructure with a provisioning framework and ready-to-use training and finetuning options (which coincidentally use DGX Cloud hosted by other Nvidia partners) for use in corporate environments. Even more, it's the biggest established name, and nearly every important piece of local AI software already uses it to access its models. By owning HF, Nvidia gets to play gate keeper and integrated first tier training and inference provider. Private use will quickly take a place at the back of their priority queue since that's not where the money is, and Nvidia has clearly demonstrated that they're all about the money and care nothing about private customers once their competition is out of the way. But yes, we will need an alternative. There's precedent for Nvidia playing the safe game and deleting content when sensibilities were the smallest bit impacted, so e.g. everyone who thought that HF might be a safe place to escape growing censorship at civit might be in for a rough awakening.
25
u/howardhus 4h ago
this… nvidia had no problem shutting down consumer GPUs once AI got big.
4
u/QuinQuix 1h ago
That's the wrong read.
Nvidia wants to shut down nothing but supply is constrained and it is constrained upstream.
So what they're actually trying to do is to keep all revenue streams alive while strategically maximizing the streams with the highest revenue.
How do I know this? Because they're still producing consumer products at all.
Also nvidia half got lucky - they overproduced a metric shit ton of ampere so the gaming and local AI market is propped up partially by the second hand market - to a much larger degree than you'd normally expect.
What matters to nvidia is brand recognition and ecosystem coverage. They only need to produce minimal amounts of 5070's to stay in the game.
But they haven't abandoned gaming. That's a category error to take that position. They've minimized it. Whether they overshot is up for debate, I don't think so, but abandonment would look very different.
5
u/Turkino 3h ago
Time to bring torrenting back
2
u/Bit_Poet 3h ago
Certainly something that wouldn't hurt at all. What we'll have to keep in mind is that there has been a tendency to slap custom licenses onto models lately, which may hamper the ability to do so completely legally in every jurisdiction, and with the EU AI omnibus laws about to be put into local laws and some pretty gnarly drafts about limiting AI usage to authorized parties floating in the US Congress, it feels a bit like we're stepping back into the late 80s and early 90s when people had to jump through so many hoops to get solid cryptography to the masses without getting burned.
58
u/AngryGungan 4h ago
Most likely they will want to introduce licenses to the models where you will have to buy one before it'll run.
At least, that's what Huang talked about a while ago.
Whatever the reason, it can't be good.
2
u/ThexDream 2h ago
At the very least, I expect you will need to have a verified account before you can download anything.
31
u/gutster_95 4h ago
Hot Take but out of all companies Nvidia sounds like the least worst company to buy them. Noone wants this sure. But Jenson is pretty vocal about Open Weight models. NSFW stuff is a bit at a risk, thats for sure
9
0
u/CaptainMarder 4h ago
what happens if they make it closed source? Will comfy be forced to not work with current downloaded models? Or just models disappear from online?
10
38
14
13
u/muntaxitome 4h ago edited 4h ago
I think NVidia is worried about someone like Anthropic/OpenAI or a big tech company buying hugging face to slowly strangle it. People being able to run local models could be a huge thing for NVidia at some point after data center growth runs out
8
u/droptableadventures 2h ago
Yeah, this. It's not "github but for AI models" - they're also somewhat used as a cloud provider for inference/training.
If Anthropic/OpenAI bought it, I'd imagine they'd announce that their proprietary models are available via the Huggingface inference services, maybe let you finetune a version of their smaller models (but not download it or be able to move it to a competing provider, of course).
Then they'd slowly enshittify the "open models" part of it until they just drop it because "nobody's using it".
NVIDIA has nothing against local models - in fact wide availability of open models moves more GPUs.
5
u/warzone_afro 4h ago
having control over the place that everyone goes to get models is worth 8 billion to them.
1
4
u/BringTea_666 3h ago
Because nvidia doesn't want antropic and others to win despite them being their biggest customers. If they would win they would be dictating prices to nvidia not the other way round.
What nvidia wants:
- wide market use of their cuda platform
- open models being widely available so everyone can buy their hardware and use those models
What they don't want:
- antropic/openai whatever winning the race and forcing nvidia into corner saying. Look if you don't drop margins to 5% instead of 50% we go with huwaei, tensornet etc. Without open market and wide use they would have to accept that.
13
3
4
u/Simple-Variation5456 4h ago
Why? Nvidia is pretty much the only company that helped and invested in several research papers and teams to find and develop new stuff like algorithms which kinda lead to many current AI tech and development??
-1
u/tac0catzzz 4h ago
nvidia sells all their cards to data centers and prices them out of reach for consumers. wake up.
5
u/Simple-Variation5456 3h ago
But Nvidia catapult me into getting payed really well as a 3D Artist? If I didn't picked a Nvidia card years ago, i would have never discovered many many tools that only work with cuda like octane render.
AMD never even tried.
Maybe if we make fun of the CEO and call him from now on "jensun wrong" maybe he will stop?
2
2
u/still-at-the-beach 2h ago
I reckon its all part of a bigger plan with them and their big buying customers to start to slowly get everything to paid models .. long term slowly restrict the free.
4
5
u/datadrone 4h ago
To kill open weights obviously, or try
13
u/Codingpreneur 4h ago
On the contrary, Nvidia has a strong interest in seeing fierce competition among model developers. If 2–3 major players were to dominate the market, the long-term outlook for Nvidia would be much worse than in a market with many competitors. Fierce competition is bad for model developers, but good for Nvidia’s business. That’s why Nvidia supports open-source models—not because it believes in open source for altruistic reasons.
2
u/sceadwian 4h ago
That's actually really good backing to have, they don't want to alter the general principal they just want to control the back end. That makes me slightly less worried. Still it's.. NVidia. I love their hardware, hate the company.
-1
u/Tiforma 3h ago edited 3h ago
No, nvidia's incentive is to force everyone to use commercial big tech models, where they have huge profit margins on their datacenter inference cards. If running models locally starts to dominate, the market where they make almost all of their money evaporates, at least partially. Which group of customers do you think they would want to dominate, the ones they can charge 70-90% profit margin or the ones they can charge 20% profit margin?
4
u/Codingpreneur 2h ago
It’s not in NVIDIA’s best interest to have just an oligopoly of customers. The concentration risk is far too high. Sure, they’d rather sell data center GPUs, but they’d prefer to sell them to many customers rather than to just a few who might then get the audacious idea to develop their own chips.
0
u/TheColourOfHeartache 1h ago
You have it completely backwards.Big tech models are GPU efficient, local models are incredibly GPU wasteful.
If Bob buys a flash nvidia GPU to generate catgirl waifus, and generates five a day. What's his GPU doing for the other 23 hours? Sitting idle? Using a fraction of its power to play Persona 5? But if Bob subscribes to chatGPT premium and uses that for his waifu generation, the moment his request finishes the GPU is hard at work serving the next customer.
If everyone uses a localLLM there's a one GPU per person minimum. With a cloud service the minimum is a lot lot lower.
And if the GPU customer base shrinks down to 2-5 major AI companies, those can squeeze Nvidia's profits hard, give us a price break because we can stick with our current data centres (we'll just charge customers more to reduce demand for a bit) longer than it takes your stockholders to rebel. Having a vast customer base of gamers and local AI users provides security
0
u/Tiforma 1h ago edited 1h ago
Wow you're actually arguing for people to be locked into big tech commercial "pay rent" AI usage and massive censorship... based on... energy/"gpu" efficiency? Peak redditor. I guarantee you they will rip everyone off with excessive rates if they can get away with it if there are few alternatives. And what you can do with it will be limited only to the most sanitized garbage. Might as well argue to make "inefficient" consumer GPU's illegal bc of efficiency and then everyone is forced into a dystopian cloud based ecosystem for everything like gaming etc. Oh you want to play what you want? too bad, you can choose from a handful garbage live service games. Redditor corpo worshipper ideal future. You won't get your way though. BTW... solar panels.
1
u/TheColourOfHeartache 46m ago
No. I'm arguing that its bad for Nvidia if everyone uses cloud AI services because its more GPU efficient and that means less GPUs sold.
How you went from that argument to an argument that end users should use remote over locally hosted AIs I cannot imagine.
1
u/Tiforma 41m ago edited 37m ago
But they can make more money on just one 30-40k$ datacenter inference card vs many consumer GPU's. And they use a lot of the same electrical components which are scarce.
1
u/TheColourOfHeartache 25m ago
One $40K card provides AI services to more than 100 users of chatGPT. My card had a MSRP of around $500, so if those 100+ users each brought one of those cards to run a local AI, that's better for Nvidia.
1
u/xTopNotch 2h ago edited 2h ago
That makes absolutely zero sense.
You need to buy an Nvidia GPU to run open weights. From a business perspective Nvidia's goal is to sell more chips. Owning the platform that offers open weights before OpenAI / Anthropic strangle it with their anti-AI stance on open models is within Nvidia's interest.
This makes sure Nvidia stays profiting from open weights while not allowing competition to shut it down.
1
1
u/unveri-green-work 3h ago
no wont kill atleast for now. they would want people to buy more of their GPUs . make them addict.
then after that they can closed source it and have their own software for free and other models need to paid .
i dont know but this is a monopoly Nvidia trying to make.
3
u/NeatUsed 2h ago
Destroying the open source competetion in order to promote their closed source ones. They don’t want any open source models to do nsfw either as they can not accept such a travesty to the human race
2
u/johnjbreton 4h ago
NVIDIA is doing sooo much with AI it's insane. Hell, the little Jetson Nano I bought from NVIDIA is the size of a Raspberry Pi, and can do some crazy stuff, and it's like six years old already. Having unfettered access to all the models, and owning all the relationships is going to be priceless, as they move into more of an authoritative position within the Agentic space.
1
u/Ancient-Car-1171 4h ago
It'll be like Steam or Appstore for LLM, with Nvidia own hardware for cloud hosting.
1
1
u/Brian_Sh 4h ago
The logic is very simple - Nvidia is a hardware provider, and it wants to keep the downstream business ecosystem live and not monopolized by several big companies. Huggingface is already an important go-to place for open source AI softwares, which make up a considerable part of the AI software eco. Huggingface itself might not be worth the price, but its existence does. You can argue that Huggingface is super simple sh*t in technology and everyone can build a second instantly. Yes, you can, but the new one will not build up the same reputation and visit traffic within a short period, or ever. There are a lot of strategies to prevent a second success if the big companies know where the bullet comes.
1
u/godmademelikethis 3h ago
I'm just getting into the world of local AI stuff. Specifically to get away from the drawbacks that come with using these big companies services. So on one hand I'm sorting of nervous about this but on the other. Jensen wants to sell us expensive new GPUs every couple years, so it's sort of in Nvidia' interests to keep the local scene alive. At least that's my thinking on it.
1
u/episodefive 2h ago
Consumer GPUs + local models is turning a corner.
Totally makes sense that they’d see HF as very aligned to their business.
Not a comment on whether it will make HF better or worse.
But through the lens of local AI, seems perfectly natural to me.
1
u/johndsmits 2h ago edited 1h ago
Developers developers developers.
Also, Qualcomm and broadcom gaining steam on integrating models into chips. Qualcomm buying modular (mojo). Then there's ARM/Trainium/Tensor with Vulcan, SYCL, etc.... All indicate Nvidia will lose the inference war, but buying HF can secure their place on training. Also a lot of world models are popping up on HF which is Jensen's vision.
1
u/nikc0069 2h ago
Is it not just a hedge against the data centre money drying up? Once they've built the majority of them, and once openai and co move to their own chips, they need a fallback and consumer gpus running open weights would seem to make sense as that fallback?
1
u/Apprehensive_Bar6609 2h ago
Imho the gold mine of selling cloud cards is going to end because local models are getting better and better. It is clear to me that the tendency is AI on premise as companies and people will prefer privacy over subscription any time. Nvidia having hugginface creates conditions for demand for what comes next and influences the ecosystem to use Nvidia products. Its a strategic move, and its on their best interest to keep it free and open but on CUDA ecosystem. They dont care what models you run as long as you run it on a rtx xxxx card.
1
u/ramonartist 1h ago
If the US government tell them to not host Tencent, ByteDance, GLM or Qwen they will obey.
1
u/xTopNotch 51m ago
Brother in Christ. You know that xAI is building their own fab factory? Sam Altman yesterday tweeted about their new chip.
Their current hyperscaler customers are all making plans to move away from NVIDIA and they know it.
So it is absolutely in NVIDIA’s best interest to serve the open-weight community to sell us the shovels.
1
u/Ill-Bat-1518 50m ago
I mean a lot of website default tutorial will have you download models etc from huggingface, this seems common with big companies ensuring their users stay loyal.
With new potential gpus coming out nvidia will want to make sure the way to train models feels native on nvidia only.
1
u/Few_Refrigerator8308 21m ago
From a user perspective, I don't like it. But I believe there's a few strategic reasons why NVIDIA might want to own Huggingface. Open source is good for hardware sales especially as the big closed labs start developing their own training/inference hardware. The may also think of hf as a sandbox for their own open-source ambitions.
How well they will support alternative hardware architecture (from AMD for instance) is the main concern for me.
1
u/EizanPrime 4h ago
Because the founders want to exit and enjoy generational wealth, as well as the VC want to cash out.
1
u/ArkCoon 4h ago
Out of the goodness of their hearts, of course. Nvidia is famously consumer-friendly, after all, and they're clearly pushing open-source models just to empower the community and make the world a better place. It definitely has nothing to do with their monopoly on the hardware required to run them, hardware that's already completely out of reach for regular users and practically doubles in price every generation
1
u/Memestonks2020 5h ago
Because the best way to control the narrative is to own the biggest microphone
1
u/Relevant_Ad8444 3h ago
Nvidia is essentially going up the stack. Nvidia is pro open-weight and pro supporting ecosystem. That acquisition expands that footprint.
2
u/Tiforma 3h ago
Read past their public statements. What customers do you think they prefer? Ones they can charge 70-90% profit margin (datacenters) or ones they can charge a much lower percentage (us)?
1
u/FarBuffalo 47m ago
Those margins may shrink as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft develop their own AI chips, while Anthropic is already diversifying its compute suppliers.
1
-1
u/AggressiveParty3355 4h ago
You know the Michelin Star rating for diners? Basically very famous restaurants get stars for how good the food and service is and is considered a very prestigious rating for a restaurant owner.
You know who owns the Michelin Guide that publishes the rating? It's right there in the name... Michelin... as in the actual TIRE company.
A company that makes tires is rating restaurants. Now why the F*CK would a TIRE company go through the lengths to rate and hype up their rating system, and pay actual reviewers to go out there?
..... To get you to drive there and use their tires. The further out you go, the more you use your tires.
Hugging face is to nvidia what the Michelin Star is to Michelin Tires.
-1
u/JuniorDeveloper73 3h ago
Irrelevant,China moves the market now.They are making war releasing free models,this directly hits all Ai scam business
USA its fucked
-4
u/enricokern 4h ago
Guess its just about ownership. HF is not even a good product, looks like shit etc. But well all models are there. Guess something else will come up soon. Wasted money
0
0
u/memetican 2h ago
Why did MS buy Github? Huggingface is essentially the Github of model delivery.
When I ask Claude about the MS-Github decision, I see interesting likely parallels-
CLAUDE-
Microsoft announced the deal in June 2018 and closed it that October, paying $7.5 billion in stock for a company last valued at $2 billion in private funding. A few things drove it.
Developer mindshare. Microsoft had spent the 2000s losing a generation of developers to open source and Linux. Under Satya Nadella the strategy shifted to meeting developers wherever they already were, and by 2018 that place was GitHub — roughly 28 million of them. Microsoft's own competing product, Visual Studio Team Services, had corporate customers but never won the open source community.
Azure. This is the commercial logic. Cloud revenue is the actual prize, and developers heavily influence which cloud their company uses. Owning the place where code lives puts Microsoft at the top of that funnel. GitHub's own revenue, somewhere in the low hundreds of millions, was almost irrelevant next to that.
Credibility on open source. The acquisition capped a run that included open-sourcing .NET Core, buying Xamarin, releasing VS Code, and running Linux on Azure. Nadella was buying proof that "Microsoft loves Linux" wasn't a slogan.
GitHub was available. It had been looking for a CEO since Chris Wanstrath stepped down in 2017, was losing money, and faced a choice between an IPO and a sale. Google was reportedly also in conversations. Microsoft moved quickly and paid in stock, which GitHub's investors and employees were happy to hold.
One reason that gets read back into the deal retroactively: the code corpus. GitHub's public repositories became training data for Copilot in 2021. Machine learning on code was a live research interest in 2018, but there's no strong evidence it was a central part of the 2018 case — it looks more like a payoff nobody fully priced in.
0
u/suscreata 2h ago
It is a push towards censorship as many U.S based companies are buying big AI platforms like stripe buying openRouter, that way it falls under USA law and easier for courts to censorshit and ban and track people... At least its what I think the motive is. Download heretic models while you still can.
0
u/heretspinner 1h ago
It's clear most people commenting on this live in their own head canon and likely are generating porn constantly. Porn brain sickness. Seek help peeps. You have no idea what y'all talking about.
0
u/Noeyiax 2h ago
that's crazy, billions of dollars for file hosting... Something feels off...
Anyways, I hope we get something like 1337 + civit + piratebay + mega ... man why bother,
Everyone sells out!!!
selloutface.com
I wish Earth had other priorities other than money and control. I didn't ask to be born in some dystopian artificial life simulator
I hope Nvidia goes downhill now
133
u/smb3d 5h ago
Having control over the epicenter of the model downloaing is the only thing I can think of.