NVIDIA reportedly buys Hugging Face for $12.9B; GLM-5.3-Flash and Qwen4 preview land same week
altryne · x · 2026-08-30
ThursdAI's August 27 episode recapped the week in AI:
- The Information reports NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B (3x its 2023 valuation); the crew debated implications for open source for an hour;
- Z.AI's mystery OX Alpha was declassified as GLM-5.3-Flash (320B-A18B, MIT, served on Chinese chips); Alibaba previewed the Qwen4 architecture with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next; Google dropped Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash live on air, topping Arena's text-to-video leaderboard;
- Two interviews: TIME 100 honoree Andy Masley dismantled datacenter panic numbers (including the 4,500x water error in Empire of AI), and Kwindla Kramer unveiled PhoneLLM — open-weights Nemotron post-train lifting PhoneBench from 28% to 72%, running voice agents at a quarter cent per minute.
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