Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reports - Reuters

Ah, marvellous. Nvidia, the company that sells the shovels in every AI gold rush, has decided to buy the mine itself — agreeing to acquire Hugging Face, the beloved repository of open-source models, for a cool $12.9 billion. That's according to The Information, citing a person with knowledge of the deal, which is corporate-speak for "we haven't a clue whether it's true, but someone in the know said so." Never mind that the entire point of Hugging Face was that models were free to everyone; now they'll be free to everyone who has Nvidia's blessing, which is rather like a monopolist buying the public library to make sure patrons only read their favourite authors.

One can already imagine the press release: "Nvidia is committed to open source" — words that will appear immediately before a price hike on inference that makes train robbery look like a lemonade stand, and a gentle suggestion that alternative frameworks are a security risk. Hugging Face hosts models of every stripe, from harmless text generators to the latest frontier beasties, and it's done so with a straight face and a "community" badge. But communities are only useful while they're free labour. The moment you own the town square, you can charge rent for every stall.

And let's not forget the $12.9 billion. That's a lot of GPUs — enough to make even Jensen Huang's holiday yacht look like a dinghy, which is saying something. The Information's anonymous source says the deal is agreed, but there's no word on whether regulators will take a look, or whether the open-source community will revolt. The latter, at least, is almost certain; the former is merely a coin toss. In the meantime, anyone who downloaded their favourite model from Hugging Face yesterday should probably back it up now, because the library is about to become a showroom.