tldr: the marketplace for opensource models became wide open

Isn&#x27;t this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.

Maybe they&#x27;re trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.

I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.

Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?

File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.

NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models.Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.I don&#x27;t know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia&#x27;s investments in OpenAI&#x2F;Anthropic.

They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual&#x2F;team&#x2F;enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.

I’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.

Possibly, but they were profitable already.

This. They are buying a brick in the xkcd #2347 diagram

You 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.

Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.

If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we&#x27;ll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)

Github was acquired for $7B. It&#x27;s hard for me to see how HF is worth almost double Github.

Here is an employee of HF at a time answering how do they make money, supposedly [1]&gt; We make money via compute credits + Enterprise Hub + HF Pro subs [...]I guess this plus custom inference deployments, external inference providers, partnerships with the big cloud AWS, Azure, etc.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;reach_vb&#x2F;status&#x2F;1928050126498713706" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;reach_vb&#x2F;status&#x2F;1928050126498713706</a>

Having an account of practically every software engineer remotely interested in AI....Profit

What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.

Hold on, these say no deal has been reached yet.

It’s not misleading according to the The Information piece (second link)<pre><code> &gt; Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source Model Repository Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion</code></pre>

The story is in an intermediate state right now, but as semiquaver points out, The Information is reporting it as fact. Since their reporting tends to be as reliable as it is hardwalled, we went with their claim in the title.

the title of this post is misleading… “in talks” != not “agrees”

Handing out digging spots if you are the shovel manufacturer sounds reasonable.

I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.

as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I&#x27;m still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.

As someone who&#x27;ve played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don&#x27;t get your hopes up.

I hope they&#x27;re good stewards. This reminds me of the Microsoft GitHub acquisition in terms of the importance to the broader community.

Its becoming impossible to track all the acquisitions.

Then use that as the link.Everything I can find online is referring to this one source. That doesn&#x27;t tell me if it&#x27;s happening or not.

According to The Information, it seem it&#x27;s finalized? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion?utm_campaign=article_email&amp;utm_content=article-17723" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nvidia-agrees-buy-op...</a>

Fix your title it&#x27;s not finalized yet!

The AI judge doesn’t have that feature yet

You are right but its the initial shock on bad news, hopefully this will spawn alternative competing services.

This is the last time I will engage in self promotion for a while but the above comment and some of its replies are a perfect demonstration of my latest guidelines violations project… <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classify.stylometry.net&#x2F;violations&#x2F;49458425?threshold=0.5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classify.stylometry.net&#x2F;violations&#x2F;49458425?threshol...</a>

Please don&#x27;t post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.No doubt you have the nucleus of a substantive comment here, but that&#x27;s not enough. If you only post the shallowest top stratum of what you&#x27;re thinking, other people do the same, and then we get &quot;Laws are for poor people&quot; and endless descending repetition. The whole point of this site is to try for something other than that.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>p.s. Also, please don&#x27;t be snarky on HN. That&#x27;s also in the guidelines.

I thin HF holds huge power in how they’ve consolidated all the open models and data, but monopoly feels like a stretch here. They are in reality a fairly small startup with lots of alternatives (all of which are much worse at this point granted) and are mostly a loss leading part of the open source ecosystem. I think it would be very hard to make a case against this on monopoly grounds, though I wouldn’t be opposed to someone trying if they thought it was possible.

Anyone old enough to remember anti trust laws or even just laws?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...</a>

um um um um do we want nvidia to be on the same network as hugging face given the recent incidents?

This isn&#x27;t vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what&#x27;s scarce.

&gt;Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers.Apple&#x27;s devices have resulted in a great increase in quality of life for myself and family members who used to waste a lot of time with Windows drivers&#x2F;BSODs&#x2F;random updates&#x2F;malware&#x2F;etc.It&#x27;s been almost 20 years, and it&#x27;s turned out OK.

Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers.  Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.

of course it isworks fine for nowwhats nvidia gonna do except make it worse?usually buyouts go something like this:1 buy company2 fire various people3 enshittifyhugging face even said they didnt want to accept a 500 million dollar investment from nvidia, because they didnt want nvidia to run the ship.instead they sell it... guess who&#x27;ll run the ship?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;hugging-face-reportedly-in-talks-to-be-acquired-for-13b&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;hugging-face-reportedly-in...</a>

The companies have aligned incentives so I don&#x27;t think this is a terrible acquisition for customers.

Gemini did a good job of explaining it. fwiw, it may have helped that i accused Gemini of leading me to a &quot;scam site&quot; like &quot;mega dot com&quot;

Because I never ever see anyone talking about using it, except for occasional reference to weights.

You could just go to their website and look at the pricing pages? Why are you asking an LLM?

I’ve asked ChatGPT etc a few times how Hugging Face makes money. Never quite got to understanding . Good for them.

Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.

Keep alive the on-prem hardware sales? Not as big part likely but still something good to have. On-prem hardware needs models to be available to be useful. So pushing those could sell more on-prem hardware.

Ai companies are making their own chips, Apple unified and other unified ram solutions also a threatNvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant

Why would the most rich and evil company on the field want to own a practical monopoly?

I really wonder why Nvidia would do this.

In fairness, most of those comments were made before Nvidia capitulated in the EGLStream war and released open kernel modules.

Linus isn&#x27;t wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.

Linus Torvalds: &#x27;Nvidia has been the single worst company we&#x27;ve ever dealt with&#x27;His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.

good or bad, it comes down to a financial decision. Nvidia was willing to offer the highest bidding price, and HF was willing to sell.

Network effects. It&#x27;s like a social network for LLM nerds as well as hosting and rating models, etc.

Not just a repo&#x2F;index but they also offer reasonably-priced compute, with a free tier not to sniff at, on which to run the models.

&gt; Isn&#x27;t it pretty much just a repo&#x2F;index for open-weight models?No, its not just a repo&#x2F;index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop&#x2F;maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo&#x2F;index, replacing a bug centralized repo&#x2F;index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.

Isn&#x27;t it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn&#x27;t it pretty much just a repo&#x2F;index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?

It also means that finding models that aren&#x27;t &quot;approved&quot; will be dealt by other websites.

I&#x27;m puzzled by the reactions. This is not a good thing. Yes, they&#x27;re releasing more open source code and models, but they do it BECAUSE OF pressure from the community and other open source projects.But Nvidia is a terrible open source and consumer company. They gatekeep a lot and oftentimes it&#x27;s only open source in name. Outside contributions are often slow-walked or rejected if they don&#x27;t align with business incentives , and leadership is retained 100% in a couple of people from a certain country.

Except for during Biden, they&#x27;ve been asleep for almost 50 years.

You can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there&#x27;s no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth

&gt; I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.

Current US government is pay to play. As in buy my cryptocurrency and you get a pardon or case dismissal, no backroom deal required. Payment directly. Blatant corruption sucks.If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.

Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry&#x27;s health.I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.Edit: antitrust regulators&#x27; job has just begun -- we&#x27;ll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).

&gt; That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.

Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production.Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.

That means we will torrent these ai models. They are not pirated so there&#x27;s no problem doing so

Yeah this is the &quot;early netflix&quot; era.  Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.

Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.

Yeah I think this is probably one of the best outcomes you could hope for if you want to use open models.

True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.

I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that&#x27;s one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible

Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?

100x this: &quot;The Government plans to regulate open source ai.&quot; and ... s&#x2F;regulate&#x2F;restrict

The Government plans to regulate open source ai.  Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor.  Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control.  A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.

Potentially horrible for monopoly reasons, but if other big acquisitions in the AI era teach us anything, developers are about to get a whole lot of free and discounted trial credits.That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.

The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn&#x27;t offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.

Overall GitHub still got significantly worse since the acquisition. Downtime was essentially zero before.

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.

The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc

Yeah I&#x27;m afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it&#x27;s all Open source

I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;ll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you&#x27;ll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)

Was Workflow available on every platform running on every hardware provider?

Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.

Is huggingface profitable?I&#x27;m not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.

Nokia buying Qt in 2008 brought an LGPL option.

I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different

The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?

No, its just the final stage of the bubble before it all comes crashing down. :)

What’s with all the big acquisitions recently? Is it advantageous for some reason to announce all of this stuff now?

The other hater is Apple, Linus’s isn’t alone…

What does Linus’s hatred of NVidia drivers imply for this situation?

It&#x27;s already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don&#x27;t show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way

We also have modelscope.cn, I&#x27;m sure that one won&#x27;t get acquired

There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.

The open weights AI ecosystem is way too concentrated with HF. That said, it was clear they were going to either get bought or aggressively monetized at some point, Nvidia seems like it could be one of the more aligned acquirers.I do worry about any sort of crowding out or downplaying non Nvidia-relevant quants, and about changing rules to crack down on models or datasets that for one reason or another “don’t align with their corporate values” - uncensored etc. Someone mentioned Microsoft and GitHub, they appear to me anyway to have been very hands off, I hope it’s the same model.

&gt; billionaires and centi millionairesI think you mean hecto-millionaires.

I think he was telling something called a joke. It&#x27;s funny because S3 is expensive and they just got some money.

Dont the American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) get any of that?

The $13b doesn&#x27;t go to hugging face&#x27;s bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face&#x27;s owners&#x27; Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.

I wonder if Cloudflare would find a cause to exclude them because I can&#x27;t imagine the transfer amounts this would generate.

Cloudflare R2 has free egress only until Cloudflare’s enterprise sales team sets its sights on your wallet :)

They need to switch to egrees free cloudflare R2!

Totally, and as long as they don&#x27;t turn on the AWS NAT Gateway, they&#x27;ll be just fine.

nvidia has a reputation for abandoning communities

Well congrats to Clem and the team. I remember when huggingface was doing things like coreference resolution models on spacy.I hope nvidia does right by the community.Edit to add: $13B should cover the S3 egress fees for a couple months :D

Nvidia has already a good free offer with Nim and a lot of compute power available. Plus, they obviously have interest in spreading open models culture.

Just like that they lost their ethos. AI oligarchy in the US is now cemented.

You&#x27;ve sold out when you became VC Funded...  It&#x27;s just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.

What, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?

To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don&#x27;t blame them.

It was either they (literally) sell out or enshittify. Choose your poison. Hosting and running LLMs is an expensive business to be in. There wasn&#x27;t ever going to be a good ending to this story. The original investors need to be made whole.

Huggingface sold out. Sad day. All the good companies lose their &#x27;dont do evil&#x27; clause as soon as they make bank

There&#x27;s a small chance this could be signalling a pivot, or at least posturing for a possible future pivot. If they see the mega-datacenter market drying up or slowing down, they may opt for a future in hardware targeted to the individual or smaller teams. In other words, as soon as the VC money for centralized AI dries up, they start selling hardware that doesn&#x27;t require VC-levels of money to buy.

If the acquisitions of late tell us anything at all, it&#x27;s that Nvidia wants to be a vertical AI company, not a hardware or gaming company.

Also they bought the company which develops the open source slurm scheduler which is the primary and defacto standard HPC scheduler on the market. Bit of a concern to say the least

&gt; Hopefully the anti-trust enforcersLet me stop you right there…

This brings back memories of the CVS&#x2F;Aetna merger for me, which ended up going through of course.  Hopefully the anti-trust enforcers have some experts in the ML&#x2F;AI pipeline, but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they didn&#x27;t bat an eye at this one.  Hope I&#x27;m proved wrong though.

There will be no antitrust cases unless it&#x27;s a shakedownx

Why will this be an antintrust case but msft owning github is not?

Obviously, NVIDIA is trying to own the AI development chain.Owning HF -- the discovery and distribution channel -- is one thing, but I think the biggest threat vector is the privileged access to HF platform data, that includes HW survey info and model download pattern. This can be a borderline anti-trust case.

Alibaba already has modelscope and their own chips, and qwen models. Nvidia is doing the same with chips, huggingface and nemotron models

They were already pretty vocal about it, but this makes Nvidia pretty much the de facto face of open weight models.As battle lines get drawn over duopoly vs. open weight it’ll be interesting to see what Nvidia does. They definitely want a piece of more of the stack especially as Huawei chips become more and more of an alternative to cuda.

I wonder if OpenRouter being acquired was a catalyst for this deal.

That is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.

OP said they will bow to pressure, which just means that governments will be able to control nv and get them to ban the obliterated models, implement ’safety’ controls on all uploaded models.

I don&#x27;t think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people.That&#x27;s the anthropics and openais of the world.

Pretty sure Nvidias dream is that OpenAI and Anthropic get into a hacking war using Nvidia cards.The problem for them is that the leading provider of training and inference is actually AWS...

&gt;Should also now be much easier for the government to just eventually force NVidia to restrict access to Chinese open models seeing as it will now become an American company that needs to obey to American law and we all know how American AI companies are lobbying for exactly that.Using regulation to avoid having to be competitive is the American Way!In all seriousness though, probably time to start an underground equivalent to HF.

Yes, this is a real possibility imho.Having Nvidia behind HF will now probably have a bunch of litigious entities salivating to sue them for not only allowing, but also distributing uncensored AI models that will then be used for deepfakes, porn, spam, scam, hacking, etc.Sure that could have also been done to HF before, but I&#x27;m thinking Nvidia is a much juicier target.Should also now be much easier for the government to just eventually force NVidia to restrict access to Chinese open models seeing as it will now become an American company that needs to obey to American law and we all know how American AI companies are lobbying for exactly that.

HuggingFace offers abliterated&#x2F;uncensored models, which would seem to run contrary to the &quot;AI is too powerful for regular people&quot; narrative that the big players are pushing.My primary concern is that Nvidia will bow to the pressure and restrict abliterated&#x2F;uncensored models on HF.

There&#x27;s over 3 million models on HuggingFace. So many quants. I&#x27;d imagine less than 0.5% would actually be seeded.

&gt; what are some alternativesgood old torrents

I&#x27;d honestly prefer that. I&#x27;m usually on 5g if not 4g and pulling models is an absolute nightmare when I basically have to use HF and even with a token getting throttled. Although I have a pretty unique use case. Pulling wads of 5gb tensor files over cellular is painful.

If HF didn’t exist, model releases would likely have been on torrents like Linux iso’s back in the day.

I don&#x27;t know anyone who &quot;finds&quot; models on HF.  The announcements always come through Reddit, HN, Xitter, and various Discords.  HF is just a place where some people bought a domain name, spun up a file server, and struck it rich.  If they went away tomorrow, they&#x27;d be replaced the next day.

I am quite skeptical that an acquisition by Nvidia will make people move somewhere else ... The network effect remains central, if you are researcher&#x2F;lab&#x2F;company and you want to promote your model&#x2F;dataset you go to the popular platform where most of the community is. The same way most of the public repo are still being published on GitHub despite people being pissed of by Microsoft acquisition. (I you add on top of that the cost changing your workflow, not using HF library, ... it make the transition even more difficult)

Alternatives are: ModelScope, Kaggle, Civitai, or even IPFS.

HF is the default platform to find models. Not just ones published by big labs but also a lot of the distilled or fine-tuned versions, etc.If Nvidia buying HF makes it tough for all the diverse models on HF, then what are some alternatives?It seems models are the best things to be available on a Torrent platform? Of course HF is much more than just the files but perhaps the metadata can be separate and hosted on multiple community platforms.

I assume it&#x27;s because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it&#x27;s a compiler to target that.Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we&#x27;re absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn&#x27;t exactly comparing apples to apples.

&gt; no-one cares anymore.possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.

&gt; as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor&#x27;s, then it&#x27;s going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector.It&#x27;s like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.

I&#x27;m still rooting for Modular, though.

Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore.Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!

Did you just quote an LLM as a citation? That&#x27;s not how citations work.

&gt; There&#x27;s only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).Your reference lacks authority, veracity, and reproducibility.

Better to site the primary source, its like googling something and then siting google as your source.

I think it&#x27;s a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone&#x27;s desk.There&#x27;s only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don&#x27;t know shit.

lol “Everything you said is correct but you’re wrong because I’m thinking about something other than what you were talking about”

&gt; NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.Of course they are. They&#x27;re commoditizing their complement.I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.

I&#x27;m with Torvalds here, fuck you Nvidia.

&quot;The proprietary shovel seller has some excellent tutorials on how to dig gold. Nobody else has such good step by step guides. Therefore them buying a shovel-agnostic tutorials and techniques method (that has a lot of info on using other shovels effectively) is justified.&quot;

They are sharing stuff that makes you consume their stuff. Their position with big ai companies is always vulnerable (asics&#x2F;direct tsmc relations)

_why_ have people started to call companies “labs”?!

&gt; NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.Dude, where&#x27;s the src for GPU drivers and the firmware blobs?Sorry, you can&#x27;t say it is one of the most open labs without qualifying a proper response to the question above.

&gt; NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.Nvidia’s history with linux shows the opposite. And as a user running models on a linux&#x2F;AMD stack, this information does not fill me with hope.

Nvidia has closed drivers, which makes them light years behind AMD in trust.Also if we were just discussing labs, Ai2 opens ~everything with dramatically less resources than Nvidia.

Their (not especially great, compared to Chinese ones) models being open weight doesn&#x27;t even come close to outweigh the effect of CUDA &amp; Co being proprietary and closed.

&gt; NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.Sure, the models are open weight, but porting the code needed to run them on non-Nvidia hardware is not trivial.

&gt; NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.A few years ago everyone said _Open_AI is the the most open labs. How did that turn out? Lots of coy, deceiving actions till the whole company was turned into whatever rent seeking amoral borg adjacent shell of it&#x27;s former past it is now.

NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;nvidia&#x2F;Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset-v2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;nvidia&#x2F;Nemotron-Post-Trainin...</a>Which other lab shares this?Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN).There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.

He definitely sounds more pragmatic than before, which is, in a sense, more positive.&gt; This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.

He has been positive about corporations and mainstream propaganda since his CoC &quot;retreat&quot;. He is no rebel anymore.Now Nvidia is also premium sponsor of the Linux Foundation.

&gt;No need to quote Linus Torvalds hereEvidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I&#x27;ve been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;binarymusings.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;talks&#x2F;linus-on-ai-linux-in-korea&#x2F;#The_rise_of_Nvidia_AMD_hardware_and_its_impact_on_Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;binarymusings.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;talks&#x2F;linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...</a>

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

The worry is not that Nvidia isn’t open about their models.The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.

Nvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets.Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others.I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware.I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.

I think this is part of an open-source play. I&#x27;m not arguing your other points, I think they&#x27;re true.They&#x27;re trying to mix up the competitive landscape(that doesn&#x27;t impact their bottom line, and I don&#x27;t think opensource is eating their lunch), so I don&#x27;t think this is fake, at least that&#x27;s my initial take.

Hf’s python &#x2F; transformers is a hot mess. It conflates so many different ideas into huge monoliths that it’s barely usable for anything other than the small snippets listed for trying out models.They need to take a machete to all the cross coupling they’ve metastasized.

As a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it&#x27;s quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will still be happy to host I am sure why not China?The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don&#x27;t use that and don&#x27;t see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.

As opposed to whom else? Do you think any of the other labs or acccelerators are clamoring for open source hardware?

Dude, the source of an LLM is the training data and the training algorithm. Those are not open, so stop calling it open source.Open weights correspond to &quot;binary available&quot; for software. Nobody would call that &quot;open source&quot;.(Even ignoring the licensing which &quot;open source&quot; normally entails.)

Arguably, this move will help AI open source market more. Nvidia has an incentive to make AI open source competitive with closed source. If OpenAI or Anthropic gains in market share, they will eventually gain power over hardware vendors as well, which Nvidia does not want.Nvidia wants people and companies to go choose a free open model, run that model on Nvidia hardware. And because Nvidia can&#x27;t fully control what hardware an AI model can run, Apple Silicon and AMD hardware users will benefit as well.

If that&#x27;s true, it may bode well for the future. The AI boom creates some strong incentives for Nvidia to develop an intentional strategy for software generally and FOSS specifically, and there&#x27;s a chance that could influence the rest of the company in a very positive direction. Hopefully, what they learn by working with HF and having the value of their hardware products increasingly determined by their ability to run FOSS software stacks will backwash into the rest of the company, or at least make them much more aware of the problem at all levels.I do think that they still might be a bit reticent to release fully open-source drivers, though, only because of the extent to which hardware design could be inferred from the driver source. OTOH, AI itself is making disassembling and reverse engineering binary code easier and easier, so there might not be much of a point to withholding the source in the near future.

Hey. I worked there, and I&#x27;m no longer bound by their PR policy, so I can mention this. Also, know that the fact that I worked there doesn&#x27;t make me privy to their high-level strategic decisions, this is a more look from the trenches kind of thing.My impression I&#x27;ve developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia&#x27;s relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don&#x27;t know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it.Here&#x27;s an anecdotal &quot;success story&quot; which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise.So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new &quot;feature&quot; which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run &quot;jobs&quot;, including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of &quot;help&quot; from AI. I was tasked with testing it.Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the &quot;distributed&quot; part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle&#x27;s MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle&#x27;s product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle&#x27;s proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn&#x27;t support the &quot;distributed&quot; part of the &quot;solution&quot;. It was pitched as the &quot;first step on the way there&quot;.So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the &quot;solution&quot; doesn&#x27;t solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back.I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the &quot;solution&quot; had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn&#x27;t do a research. He just used what he knew.Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn&#x27;t face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.

&gt; They want&gt; They want[citation needed]

Disagree. When it comes to AI, mvidia has been one of the most open labs. They open source a lot things and are open to contributions

&gt; Nvidia&#x27;s been pretty terrible for open source &#x2F; free software.Their strategy for AI is pretty clear and they bank on on-premises OSS models for the busines, with their really cool open-source software:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY</a>This is a really good watch and is a glimpse into what the actual future shapes up to be considering the current situation in where the OSS Chinese models successfully compete with proprietary US ones.

I am not sure you need to posit nefarious intent for this to be a bad deal for the industry at large.  Basically the only provider of GPUs getting into vertical integration is a classic monopoly move and I hope regulators look very hard at this.

&gt; No need to quote Linus Torvalds here.100%

Nvidia&#x27;s been pretty terrible for open source &#x2F; free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).Don&#x27;t expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.

The lowest hanging fruit that hf could offer is community monitored commands for running local models.Right now it is a pain to find the correct incantation.

Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn&#x27;t nvidias.

It&#x27;d be really nice if I could use my egpu 4090 on my macbook pro..

Nvidia is halving the production of its higher end GPUs, doubling prices and heavily segmenting the market. They don&#x27;t give a single shit about individuals. One wafer that makes 10 5090s that might sell at 3000 each, or one wafer that it already sold 6 months ago for 200k to one of the incestuous AI companies it works with?

NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it&#x27;s GPUs

Maybe but they make their real money in data centers.  Certainly, they want to have fingers on every trend.  Owning something the Government wants to control gives you more access to trade repression of open models for more Government favors and money.

Wasn’t Huang the guy who said your $500K employee should burn at least half his salary on tokens? I don’t think Nvidia is focused on cost-effective general computing for anybody.

Nvidia is promoting &quot;unmetered intelligence&quot;. Jensen wants everyone to have a spark dgx with an nvidia chip in their home.

Remember just 6 months ago that &quot;Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI&quot;
(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47088037">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47088037</a>)(Ggml.ai is llama.cpp.)Curious if the “I consider HuggingFace more &quot;Open AI&quot; than OpenAI” sentiment in that top comment will still apply with NVIDIA as the boss now...

So is the next step to just basically create a cloud business.they basically own chips - data centers - discovery etc?

I wanted to pray for AMD to attack somehow but then I remembered their owner CEO&#x27;s are cousins. Should we pray for Chinese GPUs?

That doesn&#x27;t make much sense to me. Companies don&#x27;t just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart.In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I&#x27;m not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn&#x27;t buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you&#x27;re desperate, you sell for less not more.

Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.

I am just curious, and I genuinely want to know, how is a 150 million a year in revenue company worth 13 billion dollars?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion?utm_campaign=article_email&amp;utm_content=article-17723" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nvidia-agrees-buy-op...</a> (paywalled)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;hugging-face-reportedly-in-talks-to-be-acquired-for-13b&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;24&#x2F;hugging-face-reportedly-in...</a>

Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B