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Nvidia buys Hugging Face, the GitHub of AI, for $13 billion

Nvidia says Hugging Face will stay open even as the chipmaker takes control of a key AI hub.

The Hugging Face logo in front of shipping containers.
Image: Ars Technica
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Nvidia says Hugging Face will stay open even as the chipmaker takes control of a key AI hub.

The short version

  • Nvidia has agreed to buy AI model platform Hugging Face for $13 billion, in the latest step by the $5.4 trillion chip giant to use its financial might to accelerate the technology’s boom while exerting greater control over the industry.
  • Hugging Face, which only last year turned down a large investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation to maintain its independence, serves as a repository for millions of models and data sets and has become a champion of “open” AI systems.
  • Nvidia said the goal of the deal was to speed up the spread of open models.

What happened

Unlike proprietary models from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the design of open-weight models is public and users can download, customize and run them on their own hardware. “That is how AI can scale sustainably into billions of everyday tasks across factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and Main Street businesses,” he added.

Why it matters

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is the largest designer of the advanced chips used to train and run AI models.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.

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