New York —
Nvidia announced on Thursday that it will buy artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a massive bet by the chipmaker to expand the reach of open-source AI technology.
Hugging Face, a service for hosting and accessing open-source AI models and data sets, has been in the spotlight recently after it was hacked by OpenAI models that went rogue during a testing incident.
The company has also been at the center of an industry debate over whether access to advanced AI technology should be available openly — or whether it should be “closed,” like popular models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and restricted to prevent misuse. Hugging Face said it was forced to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself from the OpenAI hack because of restrictions in how popular closed models could be used.
Unlike closed models, open-source AI models like those hosted on Hugging Face allow companies and developers to download the parameters that determine how a model functions and customize them for specific purposes. By downloading and running the models on their own infrastructure, some believe it also makes customers’ proprietary or sensitive data more secure.
