Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face

They have a winning product for sure… the worlds models have chosen a hugging face workflow, but honestly where would they be able to find the revenue required to justify another couple rounds at ever higher valuations.

To me, I think these folks see that the music is getting harder to hear and might stop entirely, might as well cash out. I do hope their employees were well taken care of, and 13b of NVDA is likely to be worth a lot more in the coming years.

Same reason why Github (fancy file storage website) was worth $7B+

Nvidia is seeing its top frontier model customers develop their own chips to sidestep Nvidia and as a counter, Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem. Open source means more competition and more demand for GPUs rather than single all-powerful labs that can will their own chips into existence and begin to push Nvidia aside. Plus Nvidia is betting big on local inference for robotics. All of this is bolstered by open source.

It's not like you can't just post model weights anywhere. There's really no lock in that Hugging Face has.

If you're looking for real monopoly issues that distort market economics and make it hard to compete without paying taxes to your competitor, consider Google's ownership of 92% of URL bars or the Google / Apple duopoly of smart phone software distribution.