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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2280 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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What exactly is going on with Hugging Face? Seems they have been bought by Nvidia?

I dunno, something feels strange but I don't know what. First the AI attacks and now this, and reading up on their background on Wikipedia just has the sound of something that was a bit dodgy. Maybe it's me. But I don't see how you go from "we're creating a chatbot aimed at teenagers" to "robotics! AI! Nvidia!" and managing to get linked with/mentioned alongside AWS, Meta, etc. along the way.

I'm way too ignorant to have an opinion, so that's why I'm asking the knowledgeable is there anything there, or have they successfully managed to generate hype and ride the wave all the way to a very fat buy-out (before the inevitable bubble bursts/crash/AI takes over the world and paperclips us all)?

They host the vast majority of the world's model weights. If you are doing work on AI, you almost certainly download the initial weights from HF because it's extremely fast and free (takes special infrastructure). Nvidia is taking control of a big part of the AI ecosystem.

There's a big question of how you monetize this stuff without enshittifying it -- right now, HuggingFace's basically just selling storage and download, a space with historically not great margins, and the obvious market option of selling model inference runs into content moderation processing problems. Probably a commoditize your complement strategy.

But yeah, if you want a hand on open weights for a lot of AI-focused stuff, HuggingFace is the standard, right now, whether you're looking at LLMs, audio processing, or a lot of vision input work. ImageGen has gravitated to other areas, but even then a lot of people also upload to HF.

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