A trio of nerdy Frenchmen came to New York to build a sassy chatbot for teens. A decade later, their startup has grown into an artificial-intelligence platform that is a pillar of the tech ecosystem, and a linchpin in the strategy of the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia agreed on Thursday to buy their AI company, called Hugging Face, for roughly $13 billion, doubling down on the chipmaker’s effort to challenge the dominance of proprietary AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. With the deal, Nvidia is helping foster the ecosystem Hugging Face built for so-called open-weight AI tools that can be…

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