EP28: NVIDIA buys Hugging Face for $12.9B & Anthropic's $100B IPO

NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, Anthropic wants a bigger IPO than SpaceX, and a Chinese open source AI model served the world's inference without a single NVIDIA chip. Plus: 2,000 humanoid robots raced in Beijing and one of them beat Usain Bolt's 100m record. Then it ran into a wall, because nobody has solved stopping yet. Rik and Ben go through the week that every layer of the AI stack got bought, built in-house, or quietly replaced. IN THIS EPISODE: • NVIDIA agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Ben does the math live: Hugging Face makes around $150M a year, putting the deal at roughly 100 times revenue. Microsoft paid 25-30x for GitHub in 2018. • Anthropic targets a roughly $100B IPO, bigger than SpaceX's record raise. Rik's objection: they rent compute from a direct competitor, and the deal has a 90-day clause. • Ox Alpha, the anonymous model developers had been hammering for weeks, turns out to be Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash. MIT licence, 1M-token context, running entirely on domestic Chinese chips. • The 5-hour limits are back on OpenAI Plus, and Ben argues rate limits have become pricing strategy rather than infrastructure. Claude Code eating the Claude chat quota is what pushed Rik back to Cursor. • Shopify's CEO floats banning Claude Code over a config file. Apple spends $1.5B on AI that can read silently mouthed words. • One developer made around $235,000 with a bid button, and Ben traces the whole idea back to the million dollar homepage, whose creator went on to co-found Calm. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Cold open 00:10 The Robot Olympics: 2,000 humanoids in Beijing 05:47 Teaching a robot a task from one video 07:29 Why AI still can't edit a video 14:03 NVIDIA buys Hugging Face for $12.9B 18:23 What is Hugging Face actually worth? 21:13 Apple quietly bought a silent-speech startup 24:38 Anthropic wants a bigger IPO than SpaceX 26:58 Is Anthropic just paying Elon's bills? 28:37 OpenAI paused frontier RL training 32:14 OpenAI's Jalapeño chip 35:21 Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash all along 39:03 Ranking every major model 42:27 The 5-hour limits are back 46:23 Shopify vs Claude Code 47:59 Grok Bot opens to everyone 51:14 outbid.lol made $132k in a week 54:02 The million dollar homepage 57:07 The new Mac mini MENTIONED: NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Microsoft, GitHub, Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code, OpenAI, Codex, ChatGPT, Z.ai, GLM-5.3-Flash, Ox Alpha, DeepSeek, Kimi K3, Cursor, Grok Bot, SuperGrok, Antigravity, Hermes, Skild AI, Tesla Optimus, World Humanoid Robot Games, OpenAI Jalapeño chip, Cerebras, Blackwell, Rubin, Apple, Siri, AirPods, Whisper Flow, Shopify, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Remotion, HyperFrames, CapCut, Descript, outbid.lol, the million dollar homepage, Calm, Replit, Bittensor, Theo's model tier list. HOSTS: Rik - https://x.com/rikventure Ben Broch - https://x.com/brochchain LISTEN AND WATCH: YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUhKe2X1RW-kLTDigvkMz4w Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0ZBhl5IVFa8wZPvIKNTkRP Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/god-mode-podcast/id1883959580 Newsletter - https://godmodepod.substack.com/ New episodes every Saturday.