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Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B

PLUS: The Ox Alpha mystery is finally solved

Author

Barsee
27 Aug

Together with

howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy thursday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

  • Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B

  • The Ox Alpha mystery is finally solved

  • Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

FITNEXA

Courtesy: Fitnexa

If you already track your workouts, steps, heart rate, or screen time, sleep is usually the next thing you start wondering about.

SomniPods 3 are sleep earbuds that also track movement overnight, so you can see more of what happened while you were asleep without wearing a watch or ring.

They’re also designed to solve the more immediate problem: actually getting through the night comfortably. Each bud weighs 3.3g, sits low in the ear, and combines Hybrid ANC, passive isolation, and sleep sounds to help reduce nighttime noise.

There’s even a private in-ear alarm, which is useful if you wake up earlier than the person next to you.

So yes, they’re earbuds. But they’re much closer to a piece of sleep gear than another pair of headphones.

*This is sponsored

THROUGH THE VALLEY

Courtesy: Clement Delangue, co-founder of Hugging Face

1/ Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B - The Information reports Nvidia has agreed to buy the open-source AI platform, which hosts millions of models and datasets and is basically where a huge chunk of the open AI ecosystem lives. This gives the AI chip giant control of one of the world’s most important platforms for open-source models and datasets. Nvidia previously offered $500M for a stake at a $7B valuation, but Hugging Face turned it down.

The interesting bit is what happens to the platform’s neutrality. Hugging Face supports models running on Nvidia, AMD, Google and others, while Nvidia now owns the whole thing.

Hugging Face was last valued at $4.5B in 2023. Nvidia is paying almost 3x that now.

Feels like Nvidia is slowly trying to own every layer of the AI stack.

2/ The Ox Alpha mystery is finally solved - Z AI revealed that the anonymous model that took over OpenRouter last week was actually its new GLM-5.3-Flash. They’d been running it anonymously to get real-world feedback, and it ended up becoming the most popular model of the week.

The interesting bit: the whole thing was running on Chinese AI chips. Z AI says the setup got its serving costs down to roughly Nvidia-level economics, which is probably more interesting than the mystery itself.

They also released the weights under MIT and say it scores 57 on Artificial Analysis at $0.045 per task on the discounted price, roughly 10x cheaper than models with similar intelligence.

So yeah, the mystery model was Z AI all along. And the bigger story might be that Chinese labs are getting really good at making capable models cheap to run.

TRENDING TOOLS

  • Memoria - a private, on-device search engine that finds photos and videos by matching text, audio, objects, and faces

  • Claude - now has a unified memory across chats and Claude Cowork

  • Claudeforce - Salesforce and Anthropic unveil Claudeforce, bringing Salesforce data and workflows directly into Claude

  • Puzzle - the accounting core where AI agents work for you

  • Putty - Google Labs’ collaborative vibe coding tool for building tools and websites

  • Skydive - build cloud-based agent coworkers that handle real, multi-step work across the tools you already use

  • Akta - a private company data API with real-time signals for automating deal sourcing and outbound workflows

  • X - launching 𝕏 Chat Agents to bring more utility and agentic experiences to Chat

  • agent-manager - run every Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI session from a single terminal screen, with new agents spawned with a single keypress

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

THE VALLEY GEMS

What’s trending on social today:

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY

Thank you for reading today’s edition. That’s all for today’s issue.

💡 Help me get better and suggest new ideas at [email protected] or @heyBarsee

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