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Inside the NVIDIA–HuggingFace Deal

September 3, 2026 · 1 h 16 min

Show notes

This week Richard and Pierce break down the biggest open-source AI deal to date: Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. We trace Hugging Face's unlikely path from a teen-focused chatbot app to the "GitHub for AI models," dig into why they turned down a $7B stake from Nvidia last year only to sell outright now, and what this means for open source, China, and platform neutrality. Then we geek out over Pollen Robotics' MicroDuck and Hugging Face's RL sandbox, before turning to Bill Gates's new open letter on AI - including his hottest takes on "human-reserve" jobs, taxing AI tokens, and what AI is doing to kids.

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