this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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266
NVIDIA reportedly buys HuggingFace for 13 billion (gizmodo.com)
submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by obsidian@discuss.online to c/technology@lemmy.world
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Damn, I hope this is not goodbye to uncensored models 😒

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[–] echodot@feddit.uk 13 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

So they are just slapping random price tags on things now. It's a database of AI questions. They have paid 13 billion dollars for a database, and everyone's acting like that's a perfectly rational sensible thing to do. No one in the financial industry has any sense anymore.

A company that's only product is something that people either don't want or actively hate has paid an eye-watering amount of money for a database to train their product on, this training will have no effect whatsoever on whether people want it.

I have this nice bridge with lots of training examples if anybody's interested, 100 trillion dollars please

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

for a database to train their product on

Isn't hugging face a database of already trained models?

[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

ELI5 huggingface?

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

ngl the first image on their website is pretty much all the explanation you need

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

hosts all the ai models and is the primary resource for downloading them for pretty much all kinds, like depthmaps, masking too, also llms, inage generators, etc.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 11 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I know huggingface. I don't know of anything they sell, though.

[–] REDACTED@infosec.pub 3 points 6 hours ago

Neither does github

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 24 points 9 hours ago

Ed Zitron is going to have an aneurysm.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 22 points 9 hours ago

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 18 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Ahhhh, this is what they meant by "the circular economy"

[–] frunch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Circular like this

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 13 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Buys what?

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Buys the ability to control open source model distribution.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 140 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Remember, the whole AI scheme exists to take the very concept of ownership from us. This takeover is hostile.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

There are worse things than copyrights not mattering anymore.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 11 points 11 hours ago

Forget about rights as a whole for us plebs.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 82 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

They should put up a back up torrent of all the currently available models before transferring ownership. Thus opening the doors for future websites.

NVIDIA is probably trying to shutdown the LLM-at-home market (which means you don't need huge clouds of graphics cards or even an Internet connection). Sad day for people who like to control their data.

[–] ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 27 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I heard somewhere they are buying it because their own development platform sucks. So they are going to replace it with hugging face.

Which doesn't preclude them from locking all the good stuff behind a subscription, of course.

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

Maybe a dev fee to post

[–] byte_0verflow@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 hours ago

Before any of these news I would use modelscope occasionally, it is the same thing as huggingface but Chinese and with a massive collection of mcp servers. Although they do not have the same amount of merged and fine tuned models, they are still a pretty good service

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 66 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

We just can't have nice things can we.

[–] obsidian@discuss.online 63 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

HuggingBay to the rescue πŸ΄β€β˜ οΈ

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 28 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

You wouldn’t pirate a model

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 12 points 11 hours ago

oh that's actually a thing, neat

[–] frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io 55 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I fail to understand the use of the term open source when the resource itself can be bought by oligarchs. Like organic vegetables, or clean coal.

[–] darkkite@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 hours ago

I've downloaded a terabyte worth of models and didn't pay a cent. storage and bandwidth cost money

[–] civ@lemmy.civl.cc 43 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Get ready for the model purge

[–] olympicyes@lemmy.world 14 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

Is there something unique about hugging face that the models cannot be hosted elsewhere? I see open source as more important to Nvidia than anyone else because it sells hardware. The services’ motivations are only partially aligned with Nvidia.

[–] civ@lemmy.civl.cc 18 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

I think it's mainly just the huge amount of storage. Huggingface has been burning venture capital money for the insane among of storage space they need, afaik

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

I've never understood why they don't seed torrents for those huge files. So much money on bandwidth that they just don't need to spend.

[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see how they could be burning considerable amounts of money on storage, as long as they have setup their own infrastructure and don't rent it.

I don't know how much they're storing, I guess they're in the petabyte territory. That's what, a few tens of millions of dollars of up front investment?

Not free, but not such a huge amount of money.

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

All they do is store tho, they dont profit off that I imagine, I honestly have no clue

[–] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 33 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Real money or pretend AI money

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago

That's the neat thing, none of it's real, and the AI investment bubble is going to make that very clear in the near future.

[–] negativenull@piefed.world 16 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

My question is what their motivation is.

  • Do they want to close down open models so more is directed at the frontier/closed companies (OpenAI/Anthropic)?
  • Or are they trying to diversify and push open models as a safety net for when the bubble bursts
[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 22 points 12 hours ago

The latter sounds like the smarter move, so it's probably the former.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Oh no we have to get decent local models from somewhere else now.

[–] leanleft@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

this site seems to be better than others ive seen : https://llama.garden/
complaints - the torrents are packs of all different quants .. or some are just safetensor files.

[–] einlander@lemmy.world 13 points 12 hours ago

And this will be why the Chinese models will win.

[–] sns@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 11 hours ago

The Ouroboros must be fed!

[–] Sims@lemmy.ml 9 points 13 hours ago

https://www.modelscope.cn/home

Not as many (old?) models though. https://presenc.ai/research/modelscope-vs-huggingface-2026

[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

One of the few AI orgs of note outside of China and the US. What's left? Black Forest?

[–] Sibshops@feddit.cl 4 points 12 hours ago

This doesn't sound like it will help the trout population.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago

AFAIK that's about 2 weeks revenue. IDK what their profit margin is, but I bet it's high.