throwaway since since i used to be affiliated with them.
HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.
While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.
This gives me a new appreciation for the panic bars (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_bar) I've been seeing my entire life. I only recently discovered (thanks to a well-hidden tag on one) that they are fire safety devices, but this article makes it clear how important they are in crowd safety for building-type venues.
Presumably not launching fireworks into the ceiling and limiting crowd sizes are the other steps that would be taken in this particular situation.
It really is sad that people have to relearn fire safety lessons over and over. (Note that none of this applies to outdoor crowds, which is obviously a much harder problem when scaled up)
HF did an amazing job in community building, transformers library and being the central store for all oss models. That said they are ages away from PMF and just have a bunch of different products non of them commercially successful (services, autotrain, quantization, HF hub for EE, inference end points etc). The majority of their revenue comes from partnerships with SageMaker/Azure where they pay them for sending users their way which wouldn't continue to grow.
While it's always a possibility for a FANG company to buy them IMO they are completely screwed. At a $4.5B valuation they will have to reach at minimum $250m in ARR to IPO and at the moment they're probably stuck at around $25m ARR.