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Hugging Face is billing OpenAI $100M for hacking it

152 points · 54 comments · cwwc

  1. jakintosh · · focus · HN ↗
    As I was falling asleep last night, this thought occurred to me: maybe NVIDIA bought Hugging Face so they prevent HF from litigating OAI for the hacking incident, because if OAI was very publicly sued for this kind of behavior from an agent, it could pour a massive amount of ice water on agent adoption as businesses suddenly see current agent systems as a existential business risk, and it would pop the infrastructure bubble (of which NVIDIAs entire valuation rests). The fact that somehow OAI committed a felony and have managed to pivot the public conversation around it to be aimed at regulatory capture instead of them being held legally accountable is pretty wild.
    1. moralestapia · · focus · HN ↗
      "Let's spend 13 billion to save 100 million".

      Yeah no, man, that's slumberland territory.

      1. orev · · focus · HN ↗
        The line of thinking is not about that $100 million bill, it’s about all the $100 million bills that come AFTER this first one.
        1. jakintosh · · focus · HN ↗
          More specifically, its not about future lawsuits, but about the trillions of dollars of market cap NVIDIA could lose if the dominant narrative shifted from “ai agents are a generational business opportunity that everyone should adopt as much as possible” to “ai agents are actually a massive business liability that lawyers wont allow anymore” as a result of a felony charge to a a corporation for the unintended actions of its agents. The idea being that OAI getting dragged into a high profile lawsuit where they are basically the first example of “your agent hacks somebody, you get held accountable for it” could pop the buildout bubble. But so far, it’s looking like with HF as the warning shot and the strong narrative control of follow up disclosures from other ai companies, there’s now a (bizarre) precedent where a company’s ai agents committing crimes is actually “nobody’s fault” and nobody gets in trouble and we just wring our hands about “alignment” instead. $13B to improve the odds of that narrative working out isn’t that crazy in that context.
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