Someone asked this morning which models to back up now that NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face. We told people to keep local copies a week ago, and four days ago we wrote about our own disk filling up and breaking our publishing. Both of those are true at once, so here is the version that reconciles them.
Two unrelated things happened on the same Thursday. The place almost every open model lives got acquired by the company that makes the chips, and the three biggest chatbots went down together because they share a cloud. Here is what we think it means for anyone running AI on their own machine, including the part where our own pipeline broke this morning.
Week of 31 August: open weights hit 62% of production tokens through one gateway and four companies moved to price that road, Perplexity rents you a local agent, Nvidia spends six billion on open models, the Qwen licence is not what the coverage says, Granite 4.2 puts the thinking dial in your hands, and a song gets printed on paper.