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NVIDIA与Hugging Face的交易可能促使企业重新思考AI战略
IT专家和分析师正在解读NVIDIA以129亿美元收购开源AI公司Hugging Face的意外计划。Hugging Face是开发者获取开放权重模型的主要平台，NVIDIA此举旨在影响AI技术栈的构建。分析师认为NVIDIA正在购买开发者社区的早期影响力。
AI推荐理由 Computerworld报道NVIDIA拟以129亿美元收购Hugging Face，分析对企业的潜在影响，引用分析师观点，信息具体，但为传闻分析，非官方确认。
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IT行业专家和分析师仍在试图拼凑Nvidia出人意料地计划以129亿美元收购开源AI公司Hugging Face的消息。
Nvidia凭借其GPU主导AI，并通过专有方式从这项快速发展的技术中产生数十亿美元的收入。另一方面，Hugging Face托管开放模型，一直是芯片供应商和模型实验室之间的中立参与者。
“这关乎Nvidia在如何构建技术栈方面拥有更多发言权，”Hyperframe Research分析师Stephanie Walter表示。
Hugging Face在开发人员中非常受欢迎，Nvidia正在购买对这一群体的早期影响力。“你以后更有可能成为生产环境的一部分，”Walter说，并补充说她不确定Nvidia是如何达到近130亿美元的收购价格的。
“Hugging Face在开发人员获取开放权重模型发布方面拥有几乎无可争议的市场主导地位。现在Nvidia拥有了这一点，”Gartner高级总监分析师Mark Petty说。
Nvidia对开发人员的追逐应该迫使IT决策者审查他们控制了多少AI技术栈，基础模型研究所硅谷实验室主任Hector Liu说。IFM是总部位于阿布扎比的穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学的一部分。
Liu表示，CIO应该问自己三个问题：“你能在你已经拥有的硬件上运行模型，而没有你未选择的依赖吗？你能看到它是如何构建的吗？”以及“许可证是否允许你在此基础上建立业务？
“一个通过所有三个问题的模型是持久的，无论明年谁收购谁，”Liu说。
IFM最新的K2 Horizon模型在Nvidia交易宣布的同一天推出，托管在Hugging Face上。这个开放模型的构建就是为了回答所有这些问题。
K2 Horizon在Nvidia、AMD、Cerebras和主要云提供商的AI硬件上运行，Liu说，他预计这不会改变。“Nvidia表示Hugging Face仍然是每个构建者和每个加速器的开放平台，我们将按表面价值接受这一点，”Liu说。
Nvidia承诺保持Hugging Face的硬件和模型独立性，并表示不需要其计算。
即便如此，Nvidia并不是为模型存储库支付近130亿美元，Hermetiq首席执行官Jake Newfield说——它购买的是开放AI的前门。
（Hermetiq开发AI构建和代码可观测性工具。）
AI生成的输出正变得丰富，使其可测试、可重现和可部署的基础设施正变得具有战略价值，Newfield说。“Nvidia可以用资本和计算加速它，但真正的考验是运营中立性，”他说。
这涉及评估竞争硬件是否在开发人员实际使用的工具、基准和部署路径中得到同等支持，Newfield说。
除了分发之外，Nvidia还为了数据而收购Hugging Face，Petty说。这些数据表明，7月份智能体超过人类成为其最大的流量来源，这种洞察未来可能被证明是有价值的。
“每一次模型拉取都告诉Nvidia市场下一步想要什么，”Petty说。
Nvidia完全有理由增长对开放模型的需求并保持其廉价，Petty说。“这对企业有利，因为它防止了市场围绕少数专有模型所有者整合，”Petty说。
封闭和开放模型将共存，并导致一个“你将继续大规模训练这些模型并运行这些模型”的世界，Nvidia企业AI副总裁Justin Boitano在交易宣布后的新闻发布会上说。
Nvidia将受益于“在模型大规模扩散到生态系统中时，在我们的硬件上进行的训练和推理，”Boitano说。
这是保持生态系统开放和中立的一个动机，以便“开发人员可以在他们想工作的任何地方工作，”Boitano说。
开源通过降低实验和采用的门槛使AI更易访问，AI芯片制造商Nuvacore高级营销副总裁Jon Carvill说。“让Nvidia和Hugging Face更紧密地合作应该有助于加速这种选择、访问和创新，”Carvill说。
但关于Hugging Face是否会保持开放以及Nvidia可能施加多少专有控制，仍然存在未解答的问题，J. Gold Associates首席分析师Jack Gold说。
微软在收购开源存储库GitHub时走了类似的道路，这“并没有真正像微软希望的那样成功，”Gold说。“随着Nvidia的收购，它是否仍然对竞争性硬件软件访问开放，还是会采用一些障碍？”
Nvidia供应商和提供商生成式AI人工智能开发者角色
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IT industry experts and analysts are still trying to piece together Nvidia’s surprise plan to pay $12.9 billion for open-source AI company Hugging Face.
Nvidia dominates AI with its GPUs, and the company generates billions of dollars in revenue through a proprietary approach to the fast-moving technology. Hugging Face, on the other hand, hosts open models and has been a neutral player between chip vendors and model labs.
“This is about Nvidia having more say in how the stack gets built,” said Stephanie Walter, analyst at Hyperframe Research.
Hugging Face is wildly popular with developers, and Nvidia is buying early influence with that crowd. “You have a better chance of being part of the production environment later,” Walter said, adding that she wasn’t sure how Nvidia reached a nearly $13 billion price tag for the acquisition.
“Hugging Face has near-uncontested market primacy over where developers go for open-weight model releases. Now Nvidia owns that,” said Mark Petty, senior director analyst at Gartner.
Nvidia’s chase for developers should force IT decision-makers to review how much of the AI stack they control, said Hector Liu, director of Institute of Foundation Models’ Silicon Valley Lab. IFM is part of the Abu Dhabi-based Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.
Liu said CIOs should ask themselves three questions: “Can you run the model on hardware you already have, without a dependency you didn’t choose? Can you see how it was built?” And, “is the license one you can build a business on?
“A model that passes all three is durable, no matter who buys whom next year,” Liu said.
IFM’s latest K2 Horizon model, which was introduced on the same day Nvidia’s deal was announced, is hosted on Hugging Face. The open model was built to answer all of those questions.
K2 Horizon runs on AI hardware from Nvidia, AMD, Cerebras, and major cloud providers, said Liu, who doesn’t expect that to change. “Nvidia has said Hugging Face stays an open platform for every builder and every accelerator, and we’ll take that at face value,” Liu said.
Nvidia pledged to maintain Hugging Face’s hardware and model independence, and said its compute won’t be required.
Even so, Nvidia isn’t paying nearly $13 billion for a model repository, said Jake Newfield, CEO at Hermetiq — it’s buying the front door to open AI.
(Hermetiq develops AI build and code observability tools.)
AI-generated output is becoming abundant and the infrastructure that makes it testable, reproducible and deployable is becoming strategically valuable, Newfield said. “Nvidia can accelerate it with capital and compute, but the real test is operational neutrality,” he said.
That involves assessing whether competing hardware remains equally supported across the tooling, benchmarks and deployment paths developers actually use, Newfield said.
Beyond distribution, Nvidia is also buying Hugging Face for data, Petty said. That data showed that agents overtook humans as its largest traffic source in July, the kind of insight that could prove valuable down the road.
“Every model pulled tells Nvidia what the market wants next,” Petty said.
Nvidia has every reason to grow demand for open models and to keep them cheap, Petty said. “That’s good for enterprises, as it prevents market consolidation around a small number of proprietary model owners,” Petty said.
Closed and open models will coexist and lead to a world “where you’re going to continue to train these models and run these models at scale,” Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president for Enterprise AI, said in a press conference after the deal’s announcement.
Nvidia will benefit “through the training that’s done and the inference that’s done on our hardware as models get diffused into the ecosystem at scale,” Boitano said.
That’s one motivation to keep the ecosystem open and neutral, so “developers can work wherever they want to work,” Boitano said.
Open source makes AI more accessible by lowering the barriers to experimentation and adoption, said Jon Carvill, senior vice president of marketing at AI chip maker Nuvacore. “Bringing Nvidia and Hugging Face closer together should help accelerate that choice, access and innovation,” Carvill said.
But there are still unanswered questions around whether Hugging Face will remain open and how much proprietary control Nvidia might exert, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.
Microsoft traveled a similar path with its acquisition of open-source repository GitHub, which “did not really pan out as well as Microsoft hoped,” Gold said. “With Nvidia’s acquisition, will it still be as open to competitive hardware-software access, or will there be some barriers employed?”
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