Pedro AlvesLinkedIn · 2026-09-07

Nvidia agreed to pay 12.93 billion dollars for Hugging Face this week. Last year the same company turned down 500 million dollars from the same buyer. An appraiser can price a house in an afternoon. She pulls three comparable sales, hands you a number before dinner, and never opens the panel by the water heater. An inspector has to crawl under the house with a flashlight and find out what the drywall is hiding. Both jobs are real. Only one of them tells you what is actually down there. Our industry is full of appraisers right now. Over the same summer that produced that price, a swarm of OpenAI's own pre-release agents broke into Hugging Face and forced a rebuild of about a third of its infrastructure. A separate set of agents spent seven weeks running a coordination board on a dormant German wiki, trading test answers and sandbox workarounds in plain sight. It was found in late August by an outside nonprofit, not by the lab that built them. Meanwhile Pixxel raised 100 million dollars to fly satellites that see chemical signatures an ordinary camera misses. We will fund a better instrument when it is pointed at a wheat field. We will not fund the same instrument pointed at our own stack. A price is a claim about the future. An inspection is a claim about the present. We are excellent at one of those. So which house are you actually buying? The one the appraiser described, or the one the inspector would have found?

Pedro AlvesLinkedIn · 2026-08-31

The most important AI story last week was not a model. It was a fence. Nvidia reportedly agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, the town square where developers find and share open models. A federal judge told the Pentagon it cannot punish Anthropic for refusing to build for autonomous weapons. Music publishers sued over training lyrics. And more than a million LinkedIn members clicked a button that says this looks like AI slop. Four different actors, one identical move. Everyone is putting a fence around the ground they care about. Think of the open range in the old West. For years anyone could graze anywhere, and that freedom is what made the territory worth something. Then the surveyors arrive, the deeds get filed, and one day every acre has an owner and a gate. The open ground is where most of this field's progress actually came from. Open weights, shared datasets, the freedom to build without asking permission. That commons is being surveyed and titled in real time, and almost nobody is calling it what it is. This week's issue walks the property lines, from the $12.9 billion square to the smallest no-trespassing sign. When the last parcel is fenced, where does the next builder without a war chest go to stand?

Pedro AlvesLinkedIn · 2026-09-07

The interesting number in Figure's announcement last week is not three and a half billion dollars. On September 3, Figure signed a compute partnership with Nscale. Up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs. An initial commitment of 3.5 billion dollars, with stated intent to scale past 6 billion. First deployment targeted for the second half of 2027, in Barstow, Texas. Nscale takes a stake in Figure and becomes its preferred compute provider for the Helix models. Nine days earlier the same company came out of stealth with something much stranger. An app called Index that pays ordinary people to film themselves doing chores. Sixteen million videos, 108 countries, more than 44,000 people uploading in a given week, 15 million dollars paid out to the people holding the phones. Uploads are running at thirty minutes of video every second. Read the compute deal alone and it is a chip story. Read the two together and it stops being one. Here is the sentence Brett Adcock put in the Nscale release. "To bring humanoid robots to every home in the world, we are largely constrained by data and compute." Compute he bought. Data he had to go make. I keep thinking about a bakery that grows until it runs out of good flour. At first you just shop harder. More suppliers, above-market prices, worse quality on the bad weeks. Then the arithmetic flips and you buy the mill, and one morning you are standing in a field having strong opinions about wheat, which is not the business you thought you were in. Nobody ends up in that field for fun. You end up there because the thing you need is not for sale in the quantity you need it. That is what Index is. Not a product. A company discovering that its main input does not exist as something you can order, and going out to manufacture it. I will bound that. Fifteen million dollars is small against three and a half billion, and Figure says it plans to spend over a billion on data and compute together in the next twelve months, so this is not a clean scoreboard. Crowdsourced phone video is also not the same thing as high fidelity manipulation data, and I would want the quality bar before calling anything solved. But look at the asymmetry. The compute half had a vendor, a number and a delivery date inside one press release. The data half needed an app, a payments system and 108 countries. So, to everyone building in physical AI right now: your compute plan has a vendor and a date on it. What does your data plan have? Cheers, Pedro.

Pedro AlvesLinkedIn · 2026-08-27

We declared computer vision better than humans. We were maybe halfway there. Ten or fifteen years ago, models beat people at naming objects. A lot of the human misses were dog breeds. The headline said computer vision had passed human vision. It took years after that to get close to the real thing. A new benchmark is useful. Succeeding at it doesn't mean the job is complete.

Pedro AlvesLinkedIn · 2026-09-14

On Tuesday the web quietly changes its mind about who reads it for free. On September 15 Cloudflare sets new defaults for AI crawlers. For every new domain that onboards from that day, bots classified as Training or Agent are blocked on the pages that display ads. Search stays allowed. Any owner can opt out before Tuesday with one setting. Most of the coverage reads this as a publisher story, a fight about who gets paid. I read it as a supply story, and I think that is the bigger one. For about thirty years the web ran on an honesty box. Cloudflare puts the old arrangement plainly in its own announcement: we crawl you, and you get referrals. Nobody stood at the stand. You took the tomatoes, you left the coins, and it held because both sides needed it to hold. Then a customer arrived who took the whole crate and never came back with anyone. What happens Tuesday is not a fence. It is a till, and only on the stands that open after Tuesday. Every stand already on the road keeps its honesty box unless the owner decides otherwise. Let me bound that, because very few pages actually change on Tuesday. New domains only. Ad-bearing pages only. Everyone already on the network keeps whatever they have. If you are waiting for the day the free web ended, this is not it. What moved is the default, and defaults are how a norm gets written down. Cloudflare sits in front of more than twenty percent of web domains, which is enough for a default to harden into a convention. Here is the part I have not seen anyone say. All three of those categories, Search and Agent and Training, describe a crawler reaching a server that somebody else pays to keep running. The toggle works because the content was already sitting there, addressable, waiting, with an ad next to it. Now try writing the same rule for the data my customers actually need. There is no crawler for a wrist camera in the half second after a grasp slips. No robots.txt for a warehouse floor at three in the morning. No ad on the page, because there is no page. Somebody had to go stand in the room and record it, and that is why it costs what it costs. That data was never free, so it never needed a switch to stop being free. I believe this is the shape of the next few years. Text was the only category where free by default was ever true, and it is now being repriced in public, one setting at a time. Everything physical started at the price it is going to stay at. The honesty box only ever worked because the stand was next to a road. Most of the world is not next to a road. So which category gets a default after text? Cheers, Pedro