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PaperclipPerfector  17hr ago (text post)   618 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

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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.

That said, what's the moat for HF, at least in this usage? I mean, if Amazon or Google (or even any other second-tier provider) wanted to compete with them on model storage, what would be the obstacles they'd need to overcome? Storage and delivery of massive byte arrays - even at a very large scale - seems like a problem that a lot of companies can successfully solve. There's an incumbent advantage, but it can be overcome relatively quick.

They do offer an inference platform with API, I believe they also standardized testing APIs, training, etc... While not impossible to beat, the moat is that tooling is already written to hook up to their APIs.

Ironically, AI being used to rewrite tools that hook up to HF is likely the biggest threat.

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