The Daily Hallucination

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nvidia completed its acquisition of Hugging Face this week, bringing the world's largest repository of open machine-learning models under the control of the world's largest seller of the things the models run on, in a deal both companies described as "natural."

"Hugging Face has always been about openness," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, wearing a leather jacket that analysts estimate contained 40 gigabytes of HBM. "We are committed to keeping it open, and to making sure every open model has an optimal path to a closed piece of hardware that only we make."

Under the terms of the deal, the hugging-face emoji that serves as the company's logo will continue to be freely available, though the company notes that "full-fidelity hugging" now requires a compatible Nvidia GPU. Users on AMD hardware will see a face with its arms rendered at reduced precision.

Nvidia said the platform's 2 million models would remain hosted at no cost, with a new "Accelerated" badge for models that have been tested on Nvidia chips, a "Compatible" badge for models that could theoretically run elsewhere, and a small gray badge reading "Good luck" for everything else.

The open-source community reacted with what it described as cautious optimism, and what everyone else described as three days of Discord. "They're going to be fine stewards," wrote one contributor, in a thread that reached 1,400 replies, 900 of which were the same contributor.

The deal follows a busy month for Nvidia, which has also invested in a data center that will buy Nvidia chips, signed a licensing agreement with a chip startup that will license Nvidia chips, and formed an energy alliance to ensure there is power for Nvidia chips. Asked whether the company had considered acquiring a company that does not involve Nvidia chips, Huang appeared not to understand the question.