RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 3 sourcesUPDATED Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models — that is, models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure — could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t waiting to find out. On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Signatories included Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, but the loudest voice among them was Nvidia. Of course it was. Nvidia has the most to lose. In his first-ever post to the social network formerly known as Twitter, Huang touted the letter arguing that open models “strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.” He added, “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Why? Nvidia’s future depends on a healthy and diverse ecosystem of models. As any good arms dealer knows, the best way to guarantee profits is to sell to both sides. But if the US restricts Chinese open-weights models, American customers' options become mediocre US models, or proprietary and increasingly expensive ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Nvidia’s addressable market shrinks and its ability to grow diminishes. What good are all these “AI factories” that Nvidia has helped prop up in that case? As we wrote last week, the US hasn’t invested in open weights models to the same extent as the Chinese model houses. For enterprises unwilling or unable to use proprietary models, models from the likes of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Z.AI, and Moonshot (Kimi) are the only credible alternatives. Thinking Machine Labs’ nearly-billion-parameter Inkling model is the best open weights model the US has to offer, and if benchmarks are to be believed at all, it's not even in the same ballpark as Kimi K3. Huang knows the stakes and the game. If the Trump administration decides to go thermonuclear and sanction Chinese model developers, there’s little he can do about it. He learned that lesson the hard way trying to get his hardware back into China. What Nvidia can do instead is light a fire under American model devs to get their act together and start churning out open weights models that are actually competitive with China. And Nvidia has an awful lot of leverage. The flex OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a tremendous burn rate, chewing through tens of billions of dollars a year in the hopes that one day their efforts might bear fruit. Until that happens, they’re entirely reliant on their ability to raise new equity and debt financing, a fact that Nvidia has taken full advantage of. Over the past year, Nvidia has announced billions of dollars of investments in AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often without binding contracts, and usually tied to infrastructure deployments. OpenAI and Anthropic respectively have $30 billion and $10 billion in funding in capital riding on Nvidia that may or may not actually materialize. And The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night that Nvidia may make a far larger commitment to OpenAI in the form of a $250 billion backstop to help the model-maker lease space from a planned $10 billion datacenter Softbank is building in Ohio. The open letter may as well have been Huang’s way of saying: ‘It would be an awful shame were something to happen to that cash, Mr. Altman. Maybe it's time to get back on the "open" bandwagon that gave your company its name. Yeah, I thought so.’ That’s certainly what OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Meta seem to have heard. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted Huang’s X post and reiterated his support for open weights models. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he wrote. OpenAI is certainly no stranger to open-weights models – GPT-2 fit the bill way back in 2020, and last year it emitted its first open model since then, GPT-OSS. At 20 and 120 billion parameters in size, the models were among the United States' most capable open models at the time, but they fell well short of OpenAI’s proprietary models and were no match for the growing number of models coming out of China. But now, GPT-OSS is practically geriatric — in the AI equivalent of dog years that is — celebrating its first birthday next month. Altman isn’t alone. Last week Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed that Meta would be getting back into the open model race soon enough. At one point, Meta had gone all in on open weights models as its key differentiator, but after Llama 4 failed to impress last year, the Social Network pivoted to proprietary models. Its first, Spark Muse, debuted earlier this year. Then there’s SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, who joined in on the Twitter quotefest. “This has my full support. Jensen is right.” he said, quoting Huang’s post. Like OpenAI and Meta, xAI, now part of SpaceX, is no stranger to open models. Earlier in the company’s foray into LLMs it committed to releasing older model weights to the public. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Elon's pronouncements, his company hasn’t followed through on that promise. Earlier this month, the conglomerate rolled out Grok 5 to the public, yet its most recent open weights model on Hugging Face is still Grok 2. Since the letter’s release, SpaceX and OpenAI have been added as signatories. Show, don't tell These commitments may turn out to be little more than virtue signaling. We don't know yet. The real test isn’t whether we see new open weights models come out of SpaceXAI, Meta, or OpenAI, but whether they invest enough so they can hold their own against Chinese models. OpenAI is the most likely player to pull this off. If we’re going to see a GPT-OSS-2, next month would be the time — assuming they’ve actually been working on a successor. If they haven’t, well, it’s going to be a bit. Anthropic, whose leadership has taken the most hostile position aga...
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