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.
On 30 August we told you the licence was a gate rather than a ban. That was not right, and the version we corrected away from was closer to the truth. Here is what the licence actually says, what applying took, and the one clause that should stop a lot of people in this hobby cold.
We ran MiniMax H3 for a full day on a single RTX 5090: talking shots driven by our own voice track, a walk and talk, text to speech, a trained voice, and an eight scene short film with its own soundtrack. Every number here came off our machine. So did the mistakes.
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.
Hugging Face says MiniMax H3 went up on 28 July. Five weeks later there are around 400 repositories with its name on them, new ones arriving at eight to twenty-four a day, and this week the community visibly stopped asking whether it runs and started asking how fast. Here is what that pace actually looks like, and why our own pipeline is not moving anywhere near that quickly.
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.
Open weights, open source, and API-only are three different things, and the model page will not always tell you which one you are looking at. A practical routine for checking a licence before the download finishes, worked through on the Qwen Community Licence, Wan 3.0, and Apache 2.0.
Our radar pulled 240 items and the video half was almost entirely one model. Three separate projects landed in a day to squeeze MiniMax H3 onto consumer GPUs, and every one of them is impressive. The thing none of the posts mention is that the licence puts an application form in front of anyone in the US, EU, UK or South Korea.
Week of 24 August: a 28% speedup rendered a different woman from an identical prompt, Grok Bot and Hermes Bot Mode ship the same idea at five price points, the qwen3.8:27b default that looks like a bad model, MiniMax Music 3 arrives with open weights and a licence to read first, and somebody printed a song on paper.
Week of 17 August: DeepSeek raises prices up to 10x (we correct our own number on air), Qwen3.8-27B lands under Apache 2.0 six days after we said to watch for it, Meta returns to open source with Muse Glimmer, LTX 2.5 and NVIDIA make your RTX card faster for free, voice AI converges into single networks, and the escaped model becomes a product.