GoKawiil
Tech News
Nvidia's Nader Khalil and Sydney Sykes will lead a session at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, running October 13-15 in San Francisco, examining how startups should choose between proprietary and open AI models. The panel will weigh trade-offs in cost, control, and speed as both open and closed model capabilities keep advancing rapidly.
Salesforce unveiled Koa, its first reasoning model, at Dreamforce this week. Built on Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron model and post-trained for sales, marketing, and customer-support tasks, Koa gives Salesforce customers an alternative to routing complex agent requests through frontier models like Claude or ChatGPT.
Nvidia has formally agreed to buy Hugging Face, the developer platform known for hosting open-source AI models and datasets, in a deal worth close to $13 billion. Nvidia says it will keep Hugging Face's open standards intact, expanding its own push into free, customizable AI tools like its Nemotron models.
Multiverse Computing has launched Quasar 438B, a reasoning model for enterprise agents and coding that operates in English and Spanish. It scored 43 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the highest mark of any European model, surpassing Mistral Medium 3.5, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra and Inkling, though still trailing global leader Claude Opus 5 at 63. It also responds quickly, generating 500 tokens including reasoning time in 15.3 seconds, and is accessible via the CompactifAI API.
GoKawiil's summer analysis of Hugging Face data shows public model repositories rose from 2.43M to 2.96M between January and August 2026, with datasets and Spaces also expanding sharply. Despite that growth, download activity remains concentrated in a tiny fraction of repositories, and Chinese labs including Moonshot, MiniMax, Xiaomi and Z.ai are releasing massive models, some exceeding a trillion parameters, without first publishing smaller versions.
Nvidia is said to be pursuing an acquisition of Hugging Face, the widely used repository where developers share and download AI models, according to reports from The Information and CNBC citing sources familiar with the matter. The deal isn't finalized, and Hugging Face had reportedly drawn interest from other suitors including Salesforce, while Nvidia, Google and Microsoft have all previously invested in the startup founded in 2016.
Perplexity and Nvidia have released Portable Computer, a locally-run version of Perplexity's Computer AI platform that performs agentic workloads directly on a user's PC or workstation instead of relying on cloud servers. The app mirrors the original Computer interface, supports Qwen 3.8 and PPLX local models (both scaling to 27 billion parameters), and will soon add Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model, while asking users for permission before sending any data to cloud-based frontier models for harder tasks.
Perplexity has released Portable Computer, an agentic AI tool that runs entirely on local hardware instead of the cloud, built in partnership with NVIDIA. It relies on compact models like Qwen 3.8 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning to handle complex tasks on-device, and only reaches out to cloud-based models when needed, with user permission. The feature is currently available to Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers running NVIDIA's DGX Spark hardware, with RTX GPU support planned.