Perhaps it’s no surprise that Nvidia ended up embracing open artificial intelligence model archive Hugging Face this week following more than a week of rumors. Even at almost $13 billion, it may end up being a steal — especially for a company that had $24 billion in cash flow last quarter alone.
The reason: Hugging Face is essentially the front door to open-source models that developers use to create applications and make them work best on specific AI chips. Although Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company won’t favor its own AI chips, Hugging Face still provides big benefits for Nvidia. “A thriving ecosystem of thousands of specialized models generates more aggregate compute demand than a handful of dominant closed APIs, and it hedges Nvidia against Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Microsoft building their own accelerators,” noted analyst Zeus Kerravala.
Meanwhile, the breakneck AI model leapfrog race continued this week as Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and World Labs released new versions.
Given that AI agents keep going rogue, it’s surely a good thing that cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike, which held its annual Fal.Con conference this week in Las Vegas, are scrambling to take advantage of the increasingly critical need to secure those models. It doubled down on AI by launching, among many other products, its own security frontier models. After all, CEO George Kurtz told SiliconANGLE, the AI control plane is the next frontier for cybersecurity.
