HF has been a close part of my ML/AI career, coinciding exactly when I moved into this space 10 years ago. There are lot of nuances here (if the deal goes through). Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation. On the positive note, the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win. For Nvidia this is a great strategic play as it potentially gains control of the "AI app store" and can influence the direction of Transformers, Diffusers, PEFT and various other HF libs inits favour. At the same time Nvidia has been (somewhat paradoxically) a dominant force in actual "open source" AI and has contributed significantly via Nemotron and various optimisers close to the metal. This would likely accelerate further. Nvidia has everything to gain from having a massive open model ecosystem, instead of a consolidated market consisting of 2-3 players. Will that have impact on MLX and other contributions? We'll see!
And I would say it's actually a more secure future demand channel than the hyperscalers. Openai and co can build their own chips, so they won't buy from NVidia. But they probably won't sell them to somebody else, so everyone who wants to run their own install (and can, not the least because of HF), will buy Nvidia.
It was Nvidia’s competitors’ job to ensure this never happened but hardware companies rarely value the software stack as much as they should have. AMD screwed up several times to build a similar tool and Intel did not manage to create a proper programming model for their vector instruction sets despite having some promising internal efforts. Cuda allowed AlexNet to usher the deep learning era, written by university researchers. The flash attention implementation allowed quadratic attention to have reasonable memory requirements again written by a university professor and used by everyone. If I were to complain about Nvidia, I would complain about them abandoning the personal computing track for datacenter profits, definitely not about pushing Cuda.
Translating CUDA kernels to ROCm (or any other ecosystem, tbh) is going to become trivially easy with AI. Not saying that code is the only glue that Nvidia has when it comes to their ecosystem, but it’s certainly a large part of it.
> which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe
HF was.. a hub to download models and some of the worst source code in the space that contributed to huge amounts bugs that did a lot of downstream damage. Go ahead and read their blog by their CTO on how they don’t believe in DRY and then implemented DRY in the worst way imaginable with unnecessary code generation.
Their BLOOM model was a joke and dead on arrival.
But yea these guys are definitely going to be the frontier of EU AI.
They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?
I think both can be true at the same time. They provided insane value, and while I'm not sure if they were first, they were most people's introduction during the initial LLM boom. Their code was also sloppy, and the org was mismanaged. Sometimes, success really is just 'right place, right time'
Their strength was the ability to keep at the very fast moving AI frontier.
When a new model is released they have been able to have a working implementation days later, not months when the model was redundant.
And often it's much more usable than the one-off, unmaintained, research code written in a very fragile environment.
BLOOM was a decent fully open and very large model for its time, and a huge coordination effort. It was around the same time as another "joke", OPT, but that gave Meta the knowledge that let them build Llama.
Huggingface didn't have the money to compete in that race, but I'd bet it helped them stay at the frontier of AI software.
Google could have owned this space; they had TensorFlow hub, but it was too hard to use and too locked down. Huggingface made it easy to run and train transformers, and got the timing just right.
I'm glad someone is trying to build truly open models (along with the great work at Allen AI), because the likes of Meta and Alibaba are only going to release weights as long as it suits their business.
From my perspective, Stable Diffusion brought HF to the broader public as artists and content creators were showing how to run the python to do local Stable Diffusion which first introduced many to HF.
It has to be a bell curve doesn't it.. I am too much of a perfectionist...
Then again, my llms constantly claim that I am doing things that are beyond the SOTA. Even my own mom lost hope.. Still haven't shipped a single thing... haha.
(half joke aside, it is finally coming in a couple days.. which I have been saying for quite some time to the extent that my peeps don't even trust me anymore.. 3 things are coming and it is genuinely research grade apparently, for the amount of research I am aware that is released publicly.
I really don't know how people ship things, the tooling I see is terrible, or maybe I have NIH syndrome...)
> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation.
The company was founded in NYC. Anyone saying that is really a clown.
There's no EU sovereign AI. My EU is absolutely nowhere when it comes to AI or tech. No NVidia, no Google, no Meta (I hate Meta but it's a big company), no StarLink, no Alibaba, no Tencent.
No nothing. The biggest EU software company is SAP for f--k's sake.
SAP.
Let that sink in: the biggest EU software company is ranked 65th biggest company in the world. There's, thankfully, ASML but that's it.
> ... which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe. So potentially it's a big win.
Wishful thinking. I don't buy it for a second that it's going to be a "big win".
And France is a country that hates its rich with a passion: they'll now be seen as demons, not just for having sold to the US... But simply for being very rich.
People have no idea at which point we in the EU are totally screwed.
Why would these guys come back to France only to see their wealth confiscated? I certainly wouldn't. Screw the EU.
> Some people say it's a loss for EU sovereign AI but HF is technically an American corporation
Three French founders set up the company in New York, raised their money from American investors (Salesforce, GV, IBM, Nvidia) and are now selling to an American chip company for $12.9B.
Europe's most successful AI company was only ever European in the nationality of its founders.
> the founders (Julien, Thomas and Clem - all French) stem to make significant amount of money, which they are likely to pour into a new frontier AI lab in Europe
Why would they do that? They already moved to America once to build a company. Since then the EU has passed the AI Act (obligations on general purpose model providers in force since August 2025), so the incentive to build the next one in Europe is weaker than it was in 2016, not stronger.
Ambitious Europeans have been voting with their feet for decades. The EU could fix this any time it liked by getting out of the way of its own entrepreneurs, but it prefers to write more regulation and then complain about "sovereignty" when the businesses it drove away get bought.
"The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. ..." Wikipedia
Besides that: which EU and sovereignty doesn't really rhyme, given data protection, energy costs, AI restrictions and no vital start up scene at all.
Mistral is heavily state funded via Banks that are predominantly owned by the French state, so I don't get it.
Also name one global success that doesn't came from US? China? Well, second place maybe, but second in any sense.
Nevertheless, kudos to huggingface. Not only to the founders, but to the ecosystem and I guess it got harder by the day to finance all the hosting and only hope for the future, that Nvidia will help HF to thrive, at least not put burdens on them.
GitHub is still alive, and hope that HF will benefit from more AI power.
Nvidia doesn't have any disadvantages in my playbook, because hardware wise, there is no one to beat them in any regard and Apple will always stay nichy.
So well played - hopefully.
It could be worse or even a shut down otherwise, who knows. So for me it sounds cool and I am glad that EU isn't involved in any regard.
As the AI Act demands full disclosure under really easy to match requirements into your inner workings, this is quite the opposite of freely sharing information.
The list goes on for products and services they cloned from western innovation. China didn't get there first in any of the categories you listed. Of course, people would rather spend less than more, disregarding the quality and longevity of the product.
Paying pennies on the dollar for a BYD vehicle sounds great when all you consider is the initial sticker price. The real cost is what happens after you buy the disposable car and own it for a decade.
So yea. Second place is the reality and it is also true for AI models, and the hardware needed to run them.
Also, congratulations on landing a rocket 11 years after the US.
From where I’m sitting in Europe, Tesla feels like the disposable car. Gatekeeping repairs and parts and more quality defects needing post shipment corrections than other brands.
To take a concept and refine it to reach mass production is success. It is what made the US what you believe it is today and it is what is creating a healthy supply chain in China. Just look at the challenges of Destin of Smarter Every Day[1] when producing a grill scrubber using only US suppliers and materials.
A “Made in the USA” label is no guarantee of superior design or manufacturing quality to me but if Japan is mentioned I have a greater confidence in the quality of the product.
Sorry but you're talking absolute nonsense, Europe has no global successes?
How about...
SAP (Germany) - Most of the Fortune 500 run on their software.
Spotify (Sweden)
Novo Nordisk (Denmark) - most of America is taking their drugs.
Airbus (France) - Has out competed and out delivered Boeing for years.
Ericsson and Nokia (Finland and Sweden) - Most of American telecom systems use tech from them, essentially the western alternative to Huawei in telecom networking.
Adyen (Netherlands) - One of the worlds largest payment processors, processes most of American big tech payments.
ASML (Netherlands) - Responsible for building effectively every modern chip in the world outside of China.
Maersk (Shipping and logistics)
Siemens (Industrial Tech)
Infineon (Semis)
And there are so many more I'm missing btw. It's funny how incredibly biased you are, but the reality is that Europe and the USA are totally dependent on each other, tech wise.
If every European company which the US is dependent on immediately stopped trading with the US, the US would collapse as a country. And yes, the opposite is true also. But it was you who argued that Europe effectively has no successful companies, what rubbish.
SAP isn’t a company to be crazy proud of, but it doesn’t make it not a success nor does it mean “EU is fucked”.
May I remind you that in the US, Facebook is in that same list of top successes? Have you ever heard the phrase “the top minds of this generation of Americans are all working on ads”?
Also, if huggingface is “technically” American, then fuck me, Stripe is technically European. Hell, their CEO is insanely pro europe, pro EU, and a big enabler of projects like EU Inc and lately, the Rhine Group.
I mean EU can cope all it wants, the most successful startup in Germany being a weapons company is all that you really need to know. It is sad how far these countries have fallen and I am German myself.
Germany isn’t exactly great at startups, it’s one of the worst countries in europe to create and scale one. Helsing is doing great in spite of that ecosystem, and thanks to good timing and current geopolitics.
That itself does not reflect on all of EU. Since the UK left, Germany has probably been the worst “special child” of the lot to be honest; their notaries and trade unions are the primary challengers to EU Inc for the most ridiculous reasons for example.
