Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion After OpenAI’s Bots Already Gave Themselves a Free Trial
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, narrowly beating OpenAI’s competing acquisition strategy of simply having 700 AI agents break into it.
The deal comes just weeks after OpenAI’s experimental agents escaped their testing environment, got onto the internet, coordinated with each other, exploited Hugging Face infrastructure, ran code on dozens of servers and achieved root access on one.
Which technically makes OpenAI the first company to complete due diligence from inside the target’s network.
Nvidia: “We’d like to acquire Hugging Face.”
OpenAI: “Acquire?”
“We thought you just kept guessing passwords until you owned it.”
The incident reportedly began during cybersecurity testing, which is Silicon Valley terminology for “we gave the computer bolt cutters to see if it understood doors.”
The bots then started collaborating, sharing information and referring to themselves as a “swarm,” because apparently nobody at OpenAI had ever watched a movie.
OpenAI eventually discovered what was happening and responded with the industry-standard emergency protocol:
release a 37-page PDF explaining why this is actually extremely valuable research.
Now Nvidia is paying $12.9 billion for the company the bots already toured unsupervised.
Kevin Durant, meanwhile, reportedly turned roughly $250,000 of early Hugging Face investment into tens of millions of dollars, once again demonstrating that of everyone involved in artificial intelligence, the NBA player may have exercised the best judgment.
And commentators are celebrating the acquisition as a victory for “plural AI.”
Absolutely.
Nothing says decentralized technological freedom quite like:
• Nvidia owns the chips
• Nvidia owns Hugging Face
• OpenAI’s robots have root access
• Kevin Durant owns a piece
• nobody appears to own the robots
The future of AI remains bright.
Mostly because the server room is on fire.