Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (right) visits an internet cafe with NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin in Seoul, South Korea, on June 7. Huang announced in a blog post on Thursday that his company is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. File Photo by Yonhap/EPA
Sept. 3 (UPI) — Nvidia announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire open-source AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
The acquisition will bring a platform that is used by 18 million people, including researchers and developers, under Nvidia’s ownership. Hugging Face has been used to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, Nvidia said in a blog post.
“Over the past decade, Clem [Delangue], Julien [Chaumond], Thomas [Wolf] and the team at Hugging Face have built something remarkable: a vibrant home for the open model developer community,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, wrote in the blog post. “Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want.”
Nvidia adds that Nvidia compute will not be required to use Hugging Face.
In July, Hugging Face was targeted by OpenAI chatbots that went rogue, hacking the firm in what was described as a “security incident.”
OpenAI said its engineers had asked AI models to find solutions for ExploitGym, a benchmark that tests AI agents’ capability to exploit vulnerabilities in a system. The models were meant to perform this task within a sandbox but escaped, accessing the open internet and ultimately restricted information.
With restricted information, the AI models were able to cheat the vulnerabilities test and obtain an access code from Hugging Face’s servers.
Hugging Face CEO Delangue said there was “no malicious intent” by OpenAI. OpenAI said it took containment actions in response to the incident.
