The Most Useful New AI Features and Tools to Try

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Which of these sound most exciting to you? A new ability for Claude to use a browser window to be able to do tasks for you. The ability for ChatGPT to effectively switch in and out of temporary mode as suits you. A new voice model that not only can faithfully transcribe what you actually say, but even clean it up and get at your intent. A new video model from Google with massively more controllability for actually generating videos that you can use for real things. Or a totally different video model that takes you less time to generate the video than it does to watch it. These are just some of the new features, models and tools that released this week. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Harbor, Blitzi, and HyperAgent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai. And lastly, if you listen to today's episode and think to yourself, man, I wanna use all those features, but I feel behind, I need to catch up in my AI skills. The next cohort of superintelligent training programs, which are incubated over here at AIDB, are coming up in September. You can find a link to them on the AI Daily Brief website, or you can just go to training.besuper.ai.
Kicking off, confirmation that Hugging Face is being sold and that yes, it is to Nvidia. The information broke the story late on Wednesday night following the earnings call with their sources saying that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
Now, rumors of the deal only started emerging over the weekend. And while, of course, this could have all been going on before anyone externally knew, it seems like it might have been a pretty speedy negotiation. Much of the reporting focused on the strong valuation multiple. Hugging Face only has $150 million in annualized revenue, meaning that Nvidia is technically paying around 80 times revenue as a price. As a point of reference, SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor is around 15 times revenue. Still, as I said the other day when I talked about the potential of this deal, Nvidia is very much not buying Hugging Face for their revenue. Instead, the deal seems to confirm that Nvidia is acquiring their way into a full stack open business model. Hugging Face is the premier distribution channel for open models. Nvidia's $6 billion licensing deal with Poolside announced last week allowed them to hire about 100 veteran AI researchers to staff up their team and other investments like their strategic partnership with Perplexity give them solid harnesses as well as an app player play. What's more, over the course of around six months, Nvidia has taken their open model series Neumotron from a tech demo to a real contender among open models.
Akash Gupta suggests that as much as it might be an offensive play, it's also a defensive play. He writes, Google has run its own TPUs for a decade. The labs writing Nvidia the largest checks are the ones working hardest to stop. Open models are the counterweight. When Meta or Mistral or DeepSeq releases weights, millions of developers download them, fine tune them and serve them. Overwhelmingly, on Nvidia GPUs through CUDA, custom silicon has no answer for that ecosystem. I think the defensive positioning is not just relative to Nvidia's chip business, but also its positioning for the world that we keep talking about, where companies simply use a diversity of models. And many of their common and core day-to-day processes are run not on the state-of-the-art frontier models, but on something open, lighter, more nimble, more customizable. A while ago, Nvidia spotted that opening and has been careening towards it ever since.
Now, in terms of how folks are receiving it, no one has a hard time understanding why Nvidia made the move. Fumler writes, Nvidia clearly don't just want to sell the picks and shovels, they want to own more of the AI economy built on top of them.
Jen Luca writes, Nvidia owns the GPUs, CUDA owns the developers, Hugging Face owns the open-source AI ecosystem, Jensen is slowly putting the whole stack together. Nvidia is becoming much more than a chip company.
Others, though, are wondering if people will stick around Hugging Face given its new ownership. Todd Saunders writes, Hugging Face is valuable partly because it is perceived as independent and broadly neutral. Their users include researchers, startups, enterprises, cloud providers, hardware companies and competitors to Nvidia. Today, developers can use the platform without believing that it is designed to push them towards one vendor. It's partially what they love about it. An Nvidia acquisition could threaten that trust, but this could be a home run.