The resignation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a major setback for the US development of an open model ecosystem. Nvidia still has the financial interests in supporting open models, which are to avoid concentration in power among a few customers who would develop their own chips and reduce Nvidia’s profits, but supporting the open ecosystem is a tricky puzzle more than an engineering problem to grind out a solution on.
Nvidia’s business operations are famously extremely dependent on Jensen as an operator, so it is a consensus opinion that there are challenges ahead (or even more high-profile departures through chip-smuggling investigations or plain-old sharks circling more poachable talent). Nvidia’s number one goal is to stabilize the ship, deliver to customers in the next 24 months, and prevent implosion. Open models have been one of Jensen’s more ambitious, founder-style bets. He has been flooding the zone with funding in a way that will very likely dry up.
In this period, the open model economy is in its nascency. These are crucial years for establishing use-cases, revenue flow, and motives to continue training the next generation models. I discussed the sensitivity of these early years in my recent talk at Fireworks Forge (slides, recording). The core of the argument is one upside for open models, a reason to be optimistic, and one downside.
The positive case is that the open model economy has correctly latched onto “ownership of intelligence” and enterprise post-training as a crucial lane. What is to be determined is exactly how big the downstream market is.
Source: Interconnects — Read the full article on the original site ↗