📰 News
➡️Hugging Face Embrace Acquisition
Hugging Face has become the de facto town square for AI, the place where people come to share their latest models and datasets. This week, Nvidia made clear their intention to install a new mayor, agreeing to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9bn.
Whether this is another arrow in Nvidia’s quiver or part of a pivot it’s too soon to say. As with all acquisitions, there’s a lot of worries about what will happen to a tool we all know and love when the amounts of money involved become astronomical.
Source: The Information
➡️ Free Ox in a Bull Market?
Early this week, there were plenty of rumblings about Ox Alpha, a new frontier model made available for free on OpenRouter. It certainly made a splash, though while some users were impressed, actual attempts to measure its performance gave more mixed results.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when it was revealed that the model was in fact GLM-5.3-Flash, a new model from Z.ai, notably running inference on all-Chinese hardware. Whether you agree with the marketing tactics or not, you can’t argue that it captured imaginations.
Source: LLMRumors
➡️ AI’ll Take the High Road
A data centre, poised to be the world’s second largest, may never get off the ground, having drawn over 1,600 objections from locals. The Scottish parliament is supposedly “inching towards a moratorium” on the project, and there are concerns that the plans for the project to ultimately power itself may not add up.
At the heart of this is one of the biggest problems that sovereign AI will face: having the infrastructure in the UK is a win for the nation, but could have big costs for whoever ends up with hundreds of thousands of GPUs living next door.
Source: The Guardian
➡️ Turning Off the Turk
Back before LLMs got good enough to do a lot of tedious data-labeling and manipulation tasks, organisations would go to Mechanical Turk to get cheap human labour. Now with AI, the business model makes less and less sense: not only do companies get their own AI to do these tasks for them now, but the humans behind the service, Turkers, are increasingly using AI too.
It’s sad to see it go, but who is going to pay for other people to offload their tasks to AI when they can do it themselves?
Source: CNBC
➡️ Is AI the New Meta?
This week, Reuters reported that they had got hold of internal memos of Meta’s grand plan from earlier this year to replace a chunk of their staff with AI, with the rest serving as supervisors to this new robot team.
Unfortunately for Meta, the plan didn’t pay off, the AI was churning out plenty of code, but not materially improving the company’s offerings. While the strategy has been shelved, I’ll bet a lot of employees aren’t too happy to know how disposable Meta executives think them to be.
Source: Reuters