I think almost the exact opposite. They want open models. Without credible open models, they only have a few customers, and those customers have leverage against nvidia. With open models, they have tons of customers, and nvidia has all the leverage.

Smaller customers are also less able to develop their own hardware and threaten NVidia's business.

Have you used Nemotron-3.5-lightening? I don’t use it as much as Poolside’s (excellent!!) Laguna XS 2.1 6bit, but the new Nemotron model is good.

I think NVIDIA does want small open models running on-prem to explode as a market! Lots of smaller GPU installations for companies who wisely want on-prem inference.

Of course NVIDIA will also keep making a ton of money selling to hyper scalers, but not forever: Chinese chips are getting better, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. designing their own inference chips.

NVIDIA is handling this brilliantly.

I think this is a classic [Commoditize Your Complement](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348) - Nvidia wants open models because their business is hardware and it's complement is AI models, so they want AI models to be commoditized so that hardware is the industry with leverage. OpenAI/Anthropic/etc want closed models so that the AI model development/data has leverage over the hardware providers.

I believe NVIDIA's long term strategy will be to pivot from the data center to the public, and the public will utilize open models on NVIDIA hardware at home. This will come after the RAMpocalypse completes (when the new fabrication plants (China, Tesla/SpaceXAI/Intel) fully ramp up and start selling their RAM for cheap in the next few years). Data centers will be for training mostly.

Nvidia is trying to increase its customer base. Look at the Mag 7, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and even Meta are all working on their own inference chips. I don't think they can completely ditch Nvidia for LLM training, but they can make their own chips for inference. I believe that's also why OpenAI made its own.

No one wants to pay the Nvidia tax

I doubt Nvidia wants to be fully dependent on the success of two highly unprofitable companies that could implode at any moment. It makes much more sense for them to commoditize LLMs so that their target market grows to every mid-sized or larger company.

The Nemotron project isn't supposed to be SOTA. It's supposed to provide proven training recipes for labs to innovate based on.

The Nemotron models are just a by-product of this strategy.

Maybe as an LLM it is, but I constantly use their streaming ASR model (called Nemotron Streaming) through Handy and it works wonderfully well.

The other way. Nvidia would love open source jevon paradoxed ai - that would run inference on their chips.

This is one of the sillier conspiracies when you think about the economics.

nVidia sells hardware. They want open models everywhere because it encourages people and companies to buy more of their hardware, which will sit idle most of the time, instead of using data center services which are ruthlessly optimized to maximize token throughput per hardware unit.

Acquiring companies that are good at training models is exactly what you would do if you were bad at training models.

I think the idea that they’d purposely spend company time and resources making a bad model is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence. The more likely explanation is that they aren’t willing to distill from their own customers, so they are at a disadvantage.

Insane conspiracy theory. There's no incentive whatsoever for Nvidia to release weak models. If you bothered to pay any attention, they are aggressively trying to catch up. Whether they succeed, that's of course a separate question.

That's precisely the opposite of what Nvidia is trying to do. Nvidia wants open and local to succeed so that their customer base is as large and diverse as possible. Some commenters here can't see that because they're blinded with cynicism.

That's always been the end game, yes.

I've seen people use those three words to make a dig at zuckerberg before, but I never put 2 and 2 together and realized the quote until just now. I think the comma was essential, made my brain automatically read it correctly... Wiseau voice and all, lol.

More on-topic: I remain amazed by how the past quarter century of American legislation has included one overwhelming boon for corporations after another. Once corporations could give an infinitly higher amount of political contributions when compared to individual citizens, it became clear that the overall well-being and happiness of corporations was the only real political focus. Anything that doesnt directly or indirectly benefit a group of corporations is almost always designed to manipulate the electorate through invented/perceived/embiggened/non-cromulent "social issues".

> It helped created behemoth corporations

What's the mechanism for this? Genuine question: I read an overview over Sarbanes-Oxley and it seems like a reasonable idea.

yea, the incentives and attitudes are all out of wack

If all successful new tech companies are absorbed into existing dominant tech companies, that would in fact be consolidation.

Enough with your facts and data.

Obviously my feelings about things I know little about, games I have no skin in, are important.

If you say anything to the contrary the group-think will downvote you.

Shut up bigot.

/s

yes, if what we are doing capitalism anyways.

if they aren't successful they should go under, financially viable organizations should be rewarded with survival; there should be more incentive to build successful sustainable businesses and more competition to drive down costs and raise quality for customers than the quick exit we see a lot of the time

Competitive markets have creative destruction

Very much so

As usual, Wikipedia has it backward. There were very few theaters in existence able to show films produced by the studios. They invested in theaters and found local businessmen to operate them, both as sole proprietors and as partners.

The investment was out of necessity, not interest in monopolies.

Writers and directors craved an audience, so they appealed to studios for funding. That’s opportunity meeting, not monopolistic practices.

It’s just government intervention in business it knows little, and can only know little, about.

Only a few years earlier none of that existed. Then it did, proved highly successful, then government, which knows not what it is doing, nor can it, comes along and gets involved in something it had no interest in, and contributed little to nothing to.

Citizen Kane type stuff

I don't love that it's Nvidia. They're already in some weird incestuous thing with two of those three (and the rest of the market).

If only Nvidia or a US lab could put out an open weights model that isn't a year behind Chinese open weights.

I would be too. Where are we going to buy the GPUs though?

Eh, given the level of trading between NVidia and the established AI companies will it be a true competitor?

That can happen without consolidation, the funding is already so circular it's dizzying