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Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
by andy99 21d ago
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
- Gigachad 21d agoI’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
- ks2048 21d agoThey make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere.
- weird-eye-issue 21d agoThis is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
- Gigachad 21d agoNot really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate. Google is obvious. Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.
- weird-eye-issue 21d agoWhether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's
- calebkaiser 21d agoThey hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.
- Gigachad 21d agoThat still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue
- calebkaiser 21d agoYeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off".
- weird-eye-issue 21d agoJust wait until you hear that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was generating no revenue.
- Gigachad 21d agoWhile it's probably easier to say this in retrospect, they were eliminating a direct competitor to their core business. Something so advantageous it should have been blocked by regulators. I can't see this as being as good of a purchase, especially when it's 13x the price of what was seen as an absurdly large amount back then.
- weird-eye-issue 21d agoYou are very good at bringing up irrelevant numbers and missing the forest for the trees
- Gigachad 21d agoYou are right, we are in a post numbers and reality economy.
- weird-eye-issue 21d agoAre you 15x more sure of that than you were last year?
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- jdejean 21d agohttps://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing
- abrookewood 21d agoI don't understand who this is targeted at. You can download the models, clone the datasets free. Who is paying them and why?
- aesthesia 21d agoThis is like asking who is paying for GitHub if you can clone repositories and download code from it for free.
- abrookewood 20d agoI guess that's a decent analogy, except the vast majority of people aren't building their own models.
- NortySpock 21d agoRisk management. Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation. Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.
- DrewADesign 21d agoTalking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times. –Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
- lotsofpulp 21d agoThis gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.
- DrewADesign 20d agoYeah the people that say things like this aren’t looking for valuable companies, or to create value, or for sustainability — they’re looking for short-term growth.
- calebkaiser 21d agoI dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago. I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field, one of the most responsible orgs in our space. They've been a pillar of open source ML for years now and have made a very positive impact on our ecosystem. Nvidia is getting a real business generating revenue, and the center of the universe for open models. Both seem like pretty valuable attributes, from Nvidia's perspective.
- jameshart 21d ago150 million a year? Why, at that rate NVidia will make their money back in just 86 years.
- calebkaiser 21d ago
- zx8080 21d ago> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free. To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
- a34729t 21d agofor 6 months?
- strictnein 21d agoWhy would Nvidia destroy the first place we all look for models to load on our Nvidia hardware?
- polnoner 21d agoThere is a brand and that brand is really a type of call option that is very hard to price. If you are doing the valuation using the tools of Ben Graham it is not really going to work. Damodaran's the Dark Side of Valuation is the text for this.
- strictnein 21d agoPossibly, but they were profitable already.
- siliconpotato 21d agoThis. They are buying a brick in the xkcd #2347 diagram
- bliteben 21d agoYou missed the part about get hacked by one of the cornerstones of the ecosystem so that you could get infinite bad press for them if you wanted.