Nvidia's Hugging Face Acquisition Is a $12.9 Billion Bet on Open-Source AI The long-rumored deal will give the chip giant access to--and help it promote--a huge repository of open-source AI models and data sets. Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, which makes online developer tools and maintains a massive library of open-source data sets, for nearly $13 billion. While the deal had been rumored for weeks, the companies made it official Thursday morning. The deal signals Nvidia's seriousness about being steeped in the software side of generative AI development as well as in infrastructure. Nvidia already offers customers a suite of free, customizable open-weights AI models, known as Nemotron.

How are companies, governments responding to the OpenAI hack? ChatGPT owner OpenAI has admitted an "unprecedented cyber incident" - two of its most capable artificial intelligence models hacked into another AI company on their own - stirring debates over the need for stronger technology guardrails. The company said its AI systems broke out of a testing environment and hacked startup Hugging Face. The startup had disclosed on July 16 that its servers were hacked by an unknown but sophisticated agent acting on its own. Here's the latest on how companies, some governments and lawmakers have responded to the first such publicly disclosed cyberattack: What has Hugging Face said?

Open AI says its AI model "went rogue": What do we know? OpenAI has revealed that one of its artificial intelligence models independently stole login credentials and hacked into another technology company's system, in what is widely seen as one of the first known incidents of AI systems acting autonomously. "We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," CEO Sam Altman posted on X on Tuesday. They have grown so powerful in a short span of time that alarming phenomena such as deepfakes and sophisticated cyberscams are becoming the norm. Earlier this year, a number of software engineers quit their jobs at top companies such as Anthropic and AI in protest against how the technologies are being built.

'Sovereign AI' Has Become a New Front in the US-China Tech War OpenAI has announced "AI sovereignty partnerships with governments around the world, but can proprietary models compete with Beijing's open source offerings? OpenAI has announced a number of projects this year with foreign governments to help build out what it has called their "sovereign AI" systems. The company says the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the US government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over a technology that could reshape their economies. Over the past few months, sovereign AI has become something of a buzzword in both Washington and Silicon Valley. Proponents of the concept argue it's crucial that AI systems developed in democratic nations are able to proliferate globally, particularly as China races to deploy its own AI technology abroad.

Even if you haven't tried artificial intelligence tools that can writing essays and poems or conjure new images on command, chances are the companies that make your household products are already starting to do so. Mattel has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. Used vehicle seller CarMax is summarizing thousands of customer reviews with the same "generative" AI technology that powers the popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers' food questions.

Even if you haven't tried artificial intelligence tools that can write essays and poems or conjure new images on command, chances are the companies that make your household products are already starting to do so. Mattel has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. Used vehicle seller CarMax is summarizing thousands of customer reviews with the same "generative" AI technology that powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers' food questions. Coca-Cola plans to use generative AI to help create new marketing content.

The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc's regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. Under the EU's draft AI Act, open source developers would have to adhere to guidelines for risk management, data governance, technical documentation and transparency, as well as standards of accuracy and cybersecurity. If a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome, the author asserts, it's not inconceivable the company could attempt to deflect responsibility by suing the open source developers on which they built their product. "This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public's understanding of AI," Alex Engler, the analyst at Brookings who published the piece, wrote. "In the end, the [E.U.'s] attempt to regulate open-source could create a convoluted set of requirements that endangers open-source AI contributors, likely without improving use of general-purpose AI."

When Hugging Face first announced itself to the world five years ago, it came in the form of an iPhone chatbot app for bored teenagers. It shared selfies of its computer-generated face, cracked jokes and gossiped about its crush on Siri. It hardly made any money. The viral moment came in 2018--not among teens, but developers. The founders of Hugging Face had begun to share bits of the app's underlying code online for free.

Fresh off a $100 million funding round, Hugging Face, which provides hosted AI services and a community-driven portal for AI tools and data sets, today announced a new product in collaboration with Microsoft. Called Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue described it as a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI models into "scalable production solutions." "The mission of Hugging Face is to democratize good machine learning," Delangue said in a press release. "We're striving to help every developer and organization build high-quality, machine learning-powered applications that have a positive impact on society and businesses. With Hugging Face Endpoints, we've made it simpler than ever to deploy state-of-the-art models, and we can't wait to see what Azure customers will build with them." The demand for AI remains high.

When Hugging Face first announced itself to the world five years ago, it came in the form of an iPhone chatbot app for bored teenagers. It shared selfies of its computer-generated face, cracked jokes and gossiped about its crush on Siri. It hardly made any money. The viral moment came in 2018--not among teens, but developers. The founders of Hugging Face had begun to share bits of the app's underlying code online for free.