from Hacker News

Hugging Face raises $235M from investors including Salesforce and Nvidia

by immortal3 on 8/24/23, 2:02 PM with 203 comments

• by QuadrupleA on 8/24/23, 2:48 PM

  Hugging Face is early in the Silicon Valley enshittification cycle - currently burning VC money being incredibly good to it's users. Next would be shifting that value to its business customers. Then clawing back and squeezing as much value as possible from those. Then collapse.

  Although, is it technically a platform / marketplace?

  Anyway for now, enjoy the free beer from the VCs.

• by jedberg on 8/24/23, 3:43 PM

  I love when Nvidia invests in AI companies. They know that money is coming right back to them. It's basically just a loan to the company in exchange for potential upside of them doing something with Nvidia's chips. :)

• by mlguy123 on 8/24/23, 4:12 PM

  throwaway since since i used to be affiliated with them.

  HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.

  While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.

• by alberth on 8/24/23, 2:54 PM

  Genuine question … What business are you in when selling AI/ML?

  I’m far from being knowledgeable in this space, but it seems like AI/ML “is a feature, not a product”.

  And if that’s the case, what business are you in when a company sells AI/ML?

  Are you in the business of licensing the model you created? Charging for the output? Hosting infrastructure? What exactly are you in the business to sell?

  To use an analogy, if you’re selling AI/ML, are you in the IaaS industry, PaaS industry, SaaS industry (or something else?)

• by kiratp on 8/24/23, 2:41 PM

  I love Huggingface. I worry they will be the next Docker.

  What is the moat? "We will run your inference" can't be the answer.

• by fidotron on 8/24/23, 2:34 PM

  ML models are the new apps. There is a huge opening for an App Store type situation which enables people to buy models and integrate them into their products, handling the appropriate licensing.

  Bonus points for certifying the models actually do what they say. That by itself will probably become a mini industry.

  Hugging Face are the clear leaders in terms of having mindshare in the community to be able to build it.

• by jvalencia on 8/24/23, 3:17 PM

  From Nvidias point of view, this might be an investment in their own business via network effects rather than a straight up investment in Hugging Face. I hope so, because when the VC money goes, the billing will go through the roof.

• by chakintosh on 8/24/23, 3:35 PM

  HF is the literal implementation of the old idiom "During the gold rush, sell shovels."

• by solarkraft on 8/24/23, 3:08 PM

  1) What do they want with all that money?

  2) How in the world are they going to pay it back?

  They better have a damn good idea because this seems like a good recipe for popping like a balloon.

• by alberth on 8/24/23, 2:38 PM

  Confusing Pricing.

  https://huggingface.co/pricing

  I’m probably missing the obvious, but one part on the pricing page it says Spaces Hardware starts at $0 … and another part says it starts at $0.05.

• by warthog on 8/24/23, 2:03 PM

  It is crazy to me that it is still 100x the ARR at this stage. I think for Deel, it as around 12x

• by solarkraft on 8/24/23, 3:06 PM

  Oh. When I last read about it I thought it was meant to be sustainable.

  I hope the founders take their share home and have fun burning the rest. At least hopefully some open software/AI models will have come out of it when the company collapses under its own weight.

• by steno132 on 8/24/23, 4:19 PM

  Congratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative.

  What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.

• by thrillgore on 8/24/23, 3:34 PM

  Are they gonna change licenses in the next week, too?

• by weego on 8/24/23, 5:00 PM

  I don't know what this could ever do that isn't easily reproducible with a tiny fraction of that investment. Fragmentation of communities is an absolute given in software.

  Added to the fact that of they get too dominant they'll get leveraged out of the supply chain and I'm not sure what the value proposition is here.

  I mean obviously I'll be wrong but it's hard to not be skeptical

• by waterheater on 8/24/23, 4:31 PM

  The real question is why the company doesn't use .ml as a domain name alias.

  Edit: dang, guess HN strips out emojis from posts. The Punycode version of the Hugging Face emoji on a relevant TLD supporting emoji domains would be http://xn--zp9h.ml/

• by sleepybrett on 8/24/23, 4:07 PM

  Hugging face is a terrible name for an ai company. Predicting it suffocating us all both mentally and physically?

• by thunkshift1 on 8/24/23, 4:30 PM

  Why salesforce?? It seems the want in on everything fancy in the market (looking at slack)

• by ckdarby on 8/25/23, 12:24 PM

  Isn't it a bit funny that Nvidia puts money into a company that is going to spend a large chunk of that capital right back at Nvidia.

  I wouldn't be surprised if there is little to near zero risk for Nvidia with this bet.

• by ineedtocall on 8/24/23, 6:12 PM

  I'm waiting on something like gumroad, but for curated models and datasets.

• by nytesky on 8/24/23, 2:28 PM

  I saw this and thought it was a startup in homage to a xenomorph facehugger. Ironic, since we are worried about AI destroying humanity.

• by mywacaday on 8/24/23, 5:09 PM

  I hadn't heard of Hugging Face before and the first though that came to mind was the face huggers from the Alien movies

• by hospitalJail on 8/24/23, 3:48 PM

  Time to find a new website to share models.

• by AdmiralAsshat on 8/24/23, 3:24 PM

  Really, throughout the entire funding process no one raised the similarity of "Hugging Face" to "Face-huggers", the larval name for the Xenomorphs from Alien?