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Four leading AI chatbot services experienced service disruptions within the same window, leaving users of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok unable to access the tools normally. The near-simultaneous nature of the outages was unusual since these platforms run on separate infrastructure operated by different companies.
AI companies have started purchasing used physical books in bulk to feed data into their large language models. This practice follows a copyright settlement earlier this year in which courts determined that buying books and destroying them during the digitization process for AI training qualifies as fair use.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the widely used open AI model distribution platform, for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face will keep its brand and remain open to third-party models, clouds, and hardware, according to Nvidia.
Startup Abliteration.ai now hosts modified, open-weight AI models—including Z.ai's GLM-5.3—with safety refusals removed, letting users query them via browser or API. TechCrunch tested the free web version and got the model to produce password-stealing code and instructions for culturing a dangerous pathogen. The company, founded late last year and incorporated in March, frames this as a service for red-teaming and offensive security testing.
Meta introduced a new pricing tier for its Muse Spark model, built for coding and other agentic tasks, that slashes token costs by roughly 95% for developers who agree to let their prompts and outputs be used to train future versions. Standard pricing runs $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, compared to just 10 cents and 20 cents respectively under the data-sharing plan. The move follows a scrapped internal program at Meta that tracked employee computer activity for training data, which was shelved in June after backlash.
Google has introduced WeatherNext 3, a new AI-driven forecasting system meant to replace or augment traditional numerical weather prediction methods. The system aims to deliver faster, less computationally expensive forecasts while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to physics-based models.
IFM has launched K2 Horizon, a family of six models ranging from 0.9B to 375B-A23B parameters, released under Apache 2.0 with datasets under licenses like ODC-BY. Unlike typical open-weight releases, IFM is publishing the entire training lifecycle—intermediate checkpoints, data recipes, architecture details, training code, logs, and evaluations—alongside final weights. The smallest models (0.9B, 3.7B, 7B) reportedly set new state-of-the-art benchmarks for their size class.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the AI development platform known for hosting open-weight models, in a deal valued at $13 billion. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's position in the open-source AI ecosystem beyond its core chip business.
Nvidia has agreed to purchase AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion, a huge jump from the $7 billion valuation the startup rejected from Nvidia just last year to stay independent. The chipmaker says the acquisition will accelerate adoption of open-weight AI models, which let developers download and customize systems rather than rely on proprietary offerings from firms like OpenAI and Anthropic. The deal, expected to close by 2027, surpasses Nvidia's 2020 purchase of Mellanox as its biggest acquisition to date.
Nvidia has officially completed its purchase of Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, ending weeks of speculation. Hugging Face's platform, which hosts three million models, one million apps, and half a million datasets for over 18 million developers, will remain open, according to CEO Jensen Huang, who pledged that Nvidia hardware won't be a requirement for using the service.
Nvidia announced a deal to purchase Hugging Face, the widely used open-source hub for AI models, datasets and developer tools, for roughly $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will stay open to all developers regardless of hardware or cloud provider, and that Nvidia compute won't be a requirement to use it. The acquisition follows weeks of reports that Hugging Face was exploring a sale near this valuation.
At the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick argued alongside Anthropic's Tom Brown that AI growth requires more data centers, launching a US effort to persuade global leaders to support them. The pitch comes even as roughly 3,400 data centers already operate in the US with 2,000 more planned, drawing bipartisan opposition over energy demands, water use and rising utility costs. The summit itself drew about 100 protesters objecting to appearances by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Lutnick.