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NitrAI 
posted an update 2 days ago
Post
1512
My (really ugly) thoughts on NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face
I don’t care if you love me or hate me – something about one of the most open community efforts ever to achieve the tagline “The community building the future“ getting gobbled up by a company that arguably is the biggest hardware monopoly that has ever existed strikes me as deeply unsettling. I don’t like monopolies, and that is that. The whole appeal of HF for me personally was always having a neutral location where anyone could develop, deploy, and test a model on their silicon of choice without being pushed into a single “official“ proprietary infrastructure stack.

I am not going to pretend that I would believe NVIDIA “open and independent“ is ever going to happen – hell we have all heard the same lines dozens of times from every corporation that has ever uttered them before.

When the single biggest producer of compute also is one of the primary locations where all open weights live, it becomes very hard not to imagine where all of this is going to end up soon enough if we continue to let companies dictate the narrative. It might be the hyperbole but it is an absolute truth for me – open-sourced AI cannot be a slave to the whims of a trillion dollar company. It is high time we realize that open AI cannot live and breathe only on the goodwill of corporate entities.

NVidia owning HuggingFace is a direct conflict of interest.

Their entire AI bet relies on people using cloud-based payed solutions through API's and tokens. If OpenAI and Anthropic died tomorrow, Nvidia would be dead too. This acquisition is a tactic, it's a typical big-tech move called embrace-extend-extinguish.

Watch it happen, soon downloads and bandwidth will get throttled, ads will appear, searches will start hiding things, terms of service will change, PRO+ and API solutions will start getting pushed. You'll see. I dont trust this for one bit and am already looking for alternatives, peer to peer if needed.

How could you HF...

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Completely nailed. EE's playbook is literally on the wall. Rate limits, pushing paid inference endpoints and corporate gating are coming inevitably.

That's precisely why we need to kill centralized repositories.

Open-source models should reside on a P2P, distributed network, not a corporate CDN. I'm currently developing an independent, torrent-supported registry (models.nitrai.dev) with 0 paywalls or telemetry. It's currently pre-alpha, but you can check out the design.

It's always been like that. When a community handles to build something that becomes big, everyone wants to have a part of the cake. They start with a small piece and will end with the whole cake.

Hi. We're currently looking for someone who can download and seed the models, if you are interested in our project.

Everyone back up your data and get ready to platform hop if huggingface goes south

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Hey, do you have some models to seed?

I release everything MIT, but you can't find the trained weights elsewhere. It's too much data and too much space to host reasonably elsewhere today. If a rival crops up I'll dual-host most likely.

All I can say is: completely agreed. Very uncertain times ahead it seems for our one-stop shop of everything AI. Hope I'm wrong!