Nvidia Is Buying the Library Where the Free AI Lives, for $12.9 Billion
About This Episode
The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the public repository where open-source AI models are published and downloaded, for $12.9 billion. Reuters, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune and Ars Technica all carried the report on August 27. The company that sells the compute open models run on would now also own the place they are distributed from.
Our Take
Open-source AI was the argument that nobody would own this technology; Nvidia just bought the place the free models are handed out, and the receipt shows the freedom was always in the download, never in the machine you need to run it.
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