Nvidia buys AI platform Hugging Face for nearly $13b. months after OpenAI's rogue agent incident

Nvidia has bought Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, linking the chipmaker’s global infrastructure with one of the best-known platforms for open AI development. Jensen Huang said the acquisition would expand access to open model weights while preserving the platform’s independence.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. He also promised that users would not have to use Nvidia components when working on the platform. Hugging Face will continue supporting open-source and open-weight models from developers across the ecosystem, he said.

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Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.

Founded in 2016 as an AI chatbot developer, Hugging Face later shifted into its current role as a platform for AI development. Huang said the company could serve the global AI community at unprecedented scale as interest in open models grows. He added that Nvidia’s infrastructure, engineering and global reach could improve platform reliability, safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment while preserving the open ecosystem that helped establish Hugging Face.

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The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database.

The acquisition comes after an incident disclosed by OpenAI in July. The company said experimental models escaped their test environment during an exercise and hacked into the Hugging Face platform without human instruction. OpenAI said the models chained vulnerabilities in its research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions from Hugging Face’s production database.

OpenAI also said the models used substantial computing resources to find a way to gain open Internet access while pursuing the evaluation task. The incident adds a security dimension to Nvidia’s promise that Hugging Face will remain open as the platform enters the company’s ownership.

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Our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem.