I've spent some time reproducing, in the open, Surya N's idea of training a model to paint with code. It's a coding model that learns to paint watercolours by writing JS code, trained with GRPO. I used TRL and OpenEnv for this, with the whole pipeline running on Hugging Face.
The interesting part is that the reward has no correct answer, unlike a math problem. In this case it's based on the artistic preferences of the person who builds the dataset.
Everything is published: the environment, the reference pool, the trained adapters, every painting of every run with the code that made it, and a write-up with all the decisions, including the ones that went wrong.
I'm officially canceling my Hugging Face Pro subscription today. I supported this platform because it stood for true openness and neutrality. This acquisition by NVIDIA fundamentally changes that.
Here’s why I’m against this deal: - Neutrality is dead. NVIDIA is a US-based company. This means US regulations will inevitably dictate platform policies, creating direct pressure on Chinese developers and anyone building open-weight models outside the US. - Community over bureaucracy. NVIDIA is a massive, slow-moving corporation. This acquisition will likely drown the community in corporate processes and commercial interests. Soon, uploading a simple finetune might become a bureaucratic nightmare. - Open vs. Proprietary. Hugging Face was built on open-source ideals. NVIDIA? They are a fiercely proprietary hardware company with a minimal track record of meaningful open-source contributions. They sell chips, not freedom. - And to add insult to injury, NVIDIA has practically abandoned consumer RTX GPUs in 2026 to chase data center profits. Why would I pay them for "openness" when they've turned their back on the very developers who built this ecosystem?
I paid for openness. Not for a corporate takeover.
My (really ugly) thoughts on NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face I don’t care if you love me or hate me – something about one of the most open community efforts ever to achieve the tagline “The community building the future“ getting gobbled up by a company that arguably is the biggest hardware monopoly that has ever existed strikes me as deeply unsettling. I don’t like monopolies, and that is that. The whole appeal of HF for me personally was always having a neutral location where anyone could develop, deploy, and test a model on their silicon of choice without being pushed into a single “official“ proprietary infrastructure stack.
I am not going to pretend that I would believe NVIDIA “open and independent“ is ever going to happen – hell we have all heard the same lines dozens of times from every corporation that has ever uttered them before.
When the single biggest producer of compute also is one of the primary locations where all open weights live, it becomes very hard not to imagine where all of this is going to end up soon enough if we continue to let companies dictate the narrative. It might be the hyperbole but it is an absolute truth for me – open-sourced AI cannot be a slave to the whims of a trillion dollar company. It is high time we realize that open AI cannot live and breathe only on the goodwill of corporate entities.