Nvidia is paying $6 billion to lock up Poolside's Model Factory — and poach 109 of the startup's researchers. The deal gives Nvidia a non-exclusive license to Model Factory, Poolside's AI model development system, and the company plans to make job offers to 109 employees who worked on the Laguna model.
Poolside's founders will stay, and the startup will continue to operate independently. But Nvidia is walking away with both the model-building platform and a big chunk of its core R&D team. Model Factory is an infrastructure system for developing AI models, covering data processing, training, reinforcement learning, and evaluation.