Humberto I. Chavez

@Denettor

Desarrollador de software, amante del cine, música y libros

Torreon, Coahuila

Joined November 2009

513 Following

173 Followers

606 Posts

Denettor retweeted

Ricardo

@Ric_RTP

12 days ago

The most important company in AI just hired a bank to sell itself. You've probably never used it. But almost every AI product you have used was built on top of it. Here's what's really going on with "the Switzerland of AI": Hugging Face is the place where open AI models actually live. A lab finishes training something and publishes the weights there. Developers pull them down. Companies build products on top of them. Millions of models, datasets and apps sitting on one platform. And the reason the whole industry trusts it is that NOBODY owns it. Look at who funded the last round in 2023: Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM. Sworn enemies writing cheques into the same company at a $4.5 billion valuation. And that was the entire point. Every rival holds a slice, so no rival controls it. That's why people started calling it the Switzerland of AI. On Sunday, Business Insider reported that Hugging Face has been working with a bank to sound out buyers at $13 billion or more. And this is where it gets really interesting… Late last year Hugging Face publicly turned down $500 million from Nvidia. They said no on the record, and the whole reason was staying independent. Then in November, CEO Clement Delangue stood on stage at the Axios BFD conference and said the industry was in an LLM bubble that might pop in 2026. He added that roughly half the $400 million his company had raised was still sitting unspent. So Delangue called the top, said he didn't need money, refused strategic cash to protect his neutrality, and then hired a bank to exit anyway. The numbers explain why: Hugging Face has raised about $395 million across 10 years. The ask is $13 billion. That's roughly 33x every dollar anyone has ever put into it. Five days before this leaked, Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter for a reported $7.5 billion. OpenRouter routes developer traffic to models. Hugging Face stores the models. Neither company builds a model of its own. Somebody has worked out that the roads are worth more than the cars. Here's what a buyer actually gets: Whoever owns Hugging Face owns the shelf that every open model on Earth sits on, including the ones built by their direct competitors. They'd set the hosting terms, the search ranking, the access rules and the download speeds for products designed to beat their own. But also keep in mind that hosting millions of free models costs a fortune and earns almost nothing. The last public revenue figure was $30 to $40 million. Delangue and his cofounders started this in 2016 as a chatbot app for bored teenagers, and 10 years in, their investors want paying. A rich owner might be the only thing keeping the Hub free. Last month OpenAI disclosed that models it was testing escaped their sandbox, reached the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face's systems. Researchers counted around 17,600 attacker actions across four days in July and laid the whole thing out at Black Hat. Nothing is signed. No buyer has been named. Hugging Face hasn't said a word in public. But the bank is already making calls. Every AI lab on Earth paid to keep this thing neutral. One of them is about to own it.

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Denettor retweeted

Héctor de Mauleón

@hdemauleon

about 5 years ago

Ufff.

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Denettor retweeted

Héctor de Mauleón

@hdemauleon

over 5 years ago

Joya de narración. 👇

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Denettor retweeted

Gonzalo Monroy

@GMonroyEnergy

over 7 years ago

Día triste. hoy le dan golpe letal al mercado eléctrico. Hoy, se publica en @CONAMER_MX , un acuerdo para que CFE se reagrupe en una sola subsidiaria de generación y que prohíbe las asociaciones público-privadas en Transmisión y Distribución. https://t.co/LWhgCaJT6c

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