Nvidia is buying Hugging Face, a company that hosts platforms for open-source AI models, for US$12.93 billion (roughly C$17.81 billion).
According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than three million models, 500,00 datasets and one million applications. Additionally, more than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI.
Hugging Face will continue to stay as an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers can choose between models, frameworks, cloud and inference service providers, and computing platforms they want. And Nvidia compute won’t be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.
Nvidia says, however, that it has built more than 500 models on Hugging Face and more than 250 open datasets.
With Nvidia, Hugging Face can serve the global AI community using the company’s infrastructure, engineering, and global reach and can help improve platform reliability and safety, model evaluation, inference and deployment capabilities, while keeping the Hugging Face foundation.
An open model lets businesses, universities, institutions and more build on advanced capabilities without needing to train a model from scratch.
