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Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for $12.93 billion — company gains control of major AI model distribution platform
Nvidia started its AI business with humble AI accelerators, then moved to AI servers, and later to rack-scale and data center-scale platforms. With its multi-faceted AI strategy in place, the company is now looking beyond hardware. On Thursday, Nvidia said it had agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world's largest platforms for distributing and developing open AI models, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will retain its brand and remain open to models, frameworks, clouds, inference providers, and computing platforms.
Nvidia positions the deal as an expansion of its commitment to open-weight AI models and as a way to popularize the use of artificial intelligence in general by enabling different types of developers to use appropriate open models for their products. The move is strategically important for Nvidia as it commands the lion's share of the AI hardware market and wants demand for its hardware to grow. Yet, Nvidia promises not to force participants of the platform into its hardware ecosystem.
Hugging Face currently serves more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators, who have uploaded over 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, according to Nvidia. Furthermore, more than 200,000 companies use the service to find, assess, modify, and deploy AI models. Nvidia claims this business model will remain intact after the acquisition: Hugging Face will continue to host open-source and open-weight models from different developers and support multiple clouds and accelerator architectures.
Meanwhile, Nvidia says that its infrastructure, engineering resources, and global presence can improve Hugging Face's platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference, and deployment capabilities, which means that it will increase the portion of Hugging Face that relies not only on its hardware but also on its resources and global presence.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
It is noteworthy that Nvidia itself already has a considerable footprint on Hugging Face. The company claims to have published more than 500 models and 250 open datasets, making it one of the platform's largest contributors. Nvidia also develops some of its models, software libraries, and tools openly so that third-party developers can modify and build upon them.
Interestingly, the deal appears to have originated with Hugging Face's founder. Nvidia's Jensen Huang says Clément Delangue approached him while evaluating the company's next stage and concluded that Nvidia could provide an appropriate home for Hugging Face, its community, and its open-model ambitions. As it turns out, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face and keep developing it. The Hugging Face team will join the Nvidia organization and continue working on the project.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
But...... I am almost certain the company founders are Aliens movie fans and wanted to name it Face-Hugger but were afraid of lawsuits. Would have been even cooler if they were to name it Xenomorph!
With that name it would have cost Nvidia a lot more....😊
Is that how they came up with the name, the face huggers , never put 2 and 3 together. I just imagined a smiley hugging a face or something. Who’s got the sociopathic tendencies ….here?
But...... I am almost certain the company founders are Aliens movie fans and wanted to name it Face-Hugger but were afraid of lawsuits. Would have been even cooler if they were to name it Xenomorph!
With that name it would have cost Nvidia! a lot more....😊
Give it a little time in the oven and I am sure something new and alien will come out of it. Now they just need to change their name to Weyland-Yutani to complete the transition...
Over 99% of techies are unaware that HF was created and intended as a chatbot for teens. Thus the name and emo.
"The technology underpinning the original product—particularly tools for natural-language processing—attracted much more interest from developers than the consumer app itself.
A focus of the business became its Hugging Face Hub, which allows developers to upload and download AI models and AI data sets in much the same way software developers use GitHub to share code." Per Wall Street Journal.
But...... I am almost certain the company founders are Aliens movie fans and wanted to name it Face-Hugger but were afraid of lawsuits.
Actually, according to interviews with company co-founder Florent Daudens, they took the name from the hugging-face emoji. As @Persister has already noted, the original intent was to market to teens.
But...... I am almost certain the company founders are Aliens movie fans and wanted to name it Face-Hugger but were afraid of lawsuits. Would have been even cooler if they were to name it Xenomorph!
With that name it would have cost Nvidia a lot more....😊
True, but after Nvidia bought it, the name’s closer to Chugging Face — just gulping compute and cash.
