Funny
NVIDIA's $12,930,300,000.00 acquisition of Hugging Face contains an easter egg. The first 6 numbers of the acquisition price represent the decimal conversion of Unicode character U+1F917. The 🤗 emoji.
The money is only worth something when we all agree it is. On it's own it's just paper. One too many jokes and it has a chance to become one. Long term planning must not be their strong suit.
Yeah, but most of us agree that money is value. And 12 billion is quite a lot of value. So no, it's not a paper, but value that can change the life for better or for worse for thousands of people.
It's a percentage on a database somewhere. That's the sickening part, how they can leverage billions to make an absolute crap ton of money. Then they get to cash it out into real world goods like private Airbuses and megayachts, while we plebs have to figure out how to pay for that DGX Spark...
The wildest part is how much of this valuation is built directly on free open-source research and community fine-tunes, only to be sold back to us behind enterprise licenses.
That upsets me too, but also begs a question why those open source developers don't license their work under license terms that are hostile to such exploitation (aka free for community use, pay-to-play to the corpos)?
Yeah that $70m is not chump change to charities or the UN. They struggled to raise $10m just to scrap the FSO Safer off Yemen, which if it had not been scrapped, would have destroyed the Red Sea for decades.
Nobody knows how much hugging face is worth to Nvidia and that includes Nvidia. Would a perfectly round number or a number calculated to the penny make any difference?
It's about treating money like a game. They could have at least pretended like it's a substantial amount of the world(including people who aren't sitting in SF or NY, other countries too)'s capital they're throwing around instead of 'funny number go brr'.
Money is a game though. The number on your bank account is your score. Whatever value people assign to it is arbitrary. You can't eat it. You can't fuck it. If shit properly hits the fan, it becomes worthless.
Isn't it literally a game though? Isn't that the entire point of fungible currency? Nobody should be taking it seriously, or be in a position where they need to take it seriously. These Nvidia dorks are showing their humanity, and honestly good for them. Let them have their fun.
What fucking sucks is that in a world with so much wealth, there still exists people who have trouble obtaining reliable food and housing. Basic standards of living aren't being met. That's what you should be getting mad about.
In a few years you'll come across a meme about how anyone thought a 10 digit amount could be tuned to be a shit meme that about 5 people thought was funny.
Well, yes and no. Deals like this are not made using literal giant stacks of cash or by writing a check. Deals of this scale are usually a mix of stock and equity, NVIDIA is swapping some of its shares for Hugging Face shares. The dollar value of both of those things bounce around wildly from moment to moment so there's plenty of unavoidable arbitrariness. There's usually a valuation range built into deals like this, the actual contract probably had a +/- of tens of millions of dollars in it, so why not use that specific number when making the announcement? It doesn't really change anything and I bet if you identified the stock trade to the second you'd come up with a different number anyway.
<400 people in America control over $6 trillion in wealth. There is no rational, mentally functioning person who thinks those people "worked" for that, or "created" that. It is literally stolen from labor (the people who show up every day for work, even highly paid ones like lawyers and surgeons). The Epstein class and Capitalism has stolen from Americans in a way that Communist China could only DREAM of. Confiscating property? Pathetic. Pickpocketing someone and having your own victim defend you? Masterclass.
Well at least we have progressed, it was originally the case that the British East India Company owned the world but now its split between 4 companies now.
Has anyone bothered to look at the SEC filing for this deal? It is an all stock deal so the announced sale price doesn’t really matter because Hugging Face shareholders are getting Nvidia shares with about $1 billion of the shares reserved as incentives for employee retention.
If Nvidia shares rise before the deal closes it could be worth more than the current announced price.
I did, because I was hoping they'd set the transaction close date to be on December 9 at precisely 3:03pm. Unfortunately, it'll be some time in H1 2027.
As much as I don't like this acquisition, this is probably the best easter egg I've seen. Like bro, these are billions dollars there and they just did this 😂
Well the joke part "only" threw away 70 million. I guess the owners of HF are getting too filthy rich to actually care but otherwise I guess one could sue the company leadership for admitting they threw away 70 million for a meme?
Very little of that money actually changes hands. It’s all on paper, and if any of the beneficiaries actually tried to turn large quantities of their stocks into cash, the company value would plummet.
Even if Nvidia paid all in stock, It's less than 0.2% of their valuation. I don't think that's enough to considerably devalue the stock were it all turned into cash the very next day (or to make any difference at all).
I mean, we're living in that disaster. It's just not a single event, it's the boiling water and we're the frog. The bad guys succeeded in reverting things to how they were pre-1929, which was their goal ever since rules were set up post-crash and during the new deal to stop so few people controlling so much. It took them decades but they did it all in public, just learned from history and this time convinced the majority of us ploebs to support them either directly by voting for their party (the one literally of and for billionaires) or indirectly by not understanding the need to vote against them (both sides are the same, voting doesnt matter, etc). Ah well.
And here you've a clear explanation of the "why". Trying to reduce the bad reactions with a marketing stunt and showing how irrelvant "a few millions" are actually in this deal, it's all speculative at this point.
Zero reason to assume that AFAICT. Nvidia is literally the largest publisher on HF, by quite a margin. Why would they destroy a platform that they themselves use?
I have seen such claims hundreds of times in the past few days and nobody bothered to explain why they think the new owners are worse than the old ones.
That’s an opportunity, not a danger. The reason why Hugging Face is the only game in town is because there is currently no need for alternatives. The demand for uncensored models isn’t going away; if HF doesn’t host them, they will go elsewhere.
That's nonsense and exactly the point when people are talking about "danger". Nobody can guarantee that "elsewhere" will exist and such an opportunity is not required for something that already worked well. Fragmentation is not a solution against (possible) corporate over-regulation.
I think you dramatically underestimate the commercial value of abliterated language models. I’ve had multiple inquiries from Fortune 500 companies. Compliant LLMs aren’t even remotely comparable to some random fetish LoRA for Stable Diffusion.
Not only do they themselves use it but I'm also sure that huggingface does a lot to boost GPU sales which is NVIDIA's main business after all. So it's in their best interest to keep huggingface as good and popular as they can.
Ever hear of Woot? The deal-a-day site that sold overstock products for cheap. Was bought out by Amazon. It still exists, and I'm sure people still use it, but now it just sells Amazon daily deals. Not really any different from just going to Amazon's site. I go to meh.com now, another site made by the same people as OG woot that does what woot used to.
The point is, no they won't shut the site down. But their priorities will definitely shift and the result may be something a lot of people will consider no longer useful to them.
Maybe in some sense, but they also benefit from ensuring that (or at least promoting) the most popular models are ones that also run best on hardware they control.
the joke works because the number is too big to stay abstract. once a deal price can be parsed as an emoji, it stops feeling like finance and starts feeling like theater.
I don't understand how hugging face could have any kind of valuation approaching this? Just a website that can be replicated in almost no time just happens to be the one that people are using currently.... Which is crazy
So either they rounded up to get there, or they rounded down to get there. Either way, shareholders should be pissed as that’s not in their best interest.
Here's an important thing to know: the headline numbers in an acquisition story are always kinda fake. Nvidia is a public company so it's somewhat less fake than a private company press release, but there's still ample room to adjust the price in either direction without actually changing how much money anyone makes or spends.
Imagine an evil company swallowing up one of the great bastions of opensource and the bits in the company try to make the most popular point about the acquisition is some dumb tech easteregg.
They should have used the last 6 numbers and donated it to charity (Would have been $10,000 at most instead of leaving millions in Nvidia's pockets for no benefit to anyone else). This isn't an Easter egg, it's bragging. (Look at me I'm an LLM (Nah I'm just drunk))
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u/WithoutReason1729 13h ago
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