Nvidia’s Open Source Alliance Snubs OpenAI and

What happened

Brian Barrett: This OpenAI incident has really kicked off so many intersecting issues. You've got open versus closed AI, you've got AI security and who's responsible for it. You've got US regulation. We're even at a point now where staffers from top intelligence firms, more than 1100 of them signed a petition calling on the US government to help deliberately pace "AI development" to prevent it from advancing too fast.

" On top of which it turns out that OpenAI's initial disclosure wasn't even the full story. It came out on Tuesday evening that one of its agents actually broke into four different platforms that weren't Hugging Face on its way to getting into Hugging Face.

" The signatories of the letter include the CEO of Anthropic and the chief scientists from OpenAI and Meta Super Intelligence Lab. Zoë Schiffer: My thought was basically, did we learn nothing from Dario Amodei saying that AI is really scary and dangerous?

And then having the US government come down pretty hard on Anthropic asking you might actually receive, I don't know if they want the US government to do what it could do if they listen to the letter quite literally, but it does show that even people, I mean especially people working on AI systems are scared by what the race is doing.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean we talked a lot about this last week for sure when we were talking about DC's reaction and what's going on from the White House perspective. I've been so curious about that split a little bit. Last week we talked about the rift that this has really created in Silicon Valley, the idea of open source versus proprietary AI.

This is really touching every single sector right now, without a doubt. Zoë Schiffer: I will say I was at this event on Saturday with a bunch of AI lobbyists from DC, Thinking Machines. Mira Moradi was there, Michael Kratsios from the White House was there.

And I was really struck by how they seem to be operating in this kind of parallel AI world from the one that I see on the ground in San Francisco. They were talking a lot about open source versus closed source.

When I talk to engineers in particular, I will say most of them experiment with a lot of open models, but they still find that Codex and Claude code, the coding models from OpenAI and Anthropic, are just far superior. And so, they end up using those even though they're a lot more expensive. Alex Karp was on TV earlier talking about this.

He's the CEO of Palantir, basically making this a core issue for America winning the AI race. Palantir and Nvidia, they have a vested interest in pushing forward this plan. More AI, more systems mean more GPUs—that directly benefits Nvidia's bottom line.

And Palantir is deploying AI systems on government systems and other places where security is really paramount and they need to do that on American technology, but it's much easier to do it with systems that you can tweak, play around with, modify, change.

Brian Barrett: It is interesting these strange, not strange, but the way that the, I'm going to say battle lines, I don't mean that, it's too dramatic, but that they're being drawn, the sort of argument lines are being drawn in this. To your point, Nvidia's Jensen Huang spoke with Axios recently and he spelled out exactly why the proliferation of open models would benefit his company.

Jensen Huang, archival audio: First of all, with great AI, open models, it's great for the whole industry. If there's great AI, even if it's open, wherever it comes from, there will be more use. Whenever there's more use, you'll have to sell a lot more Nvidia computers. We'll have to build more data centers, we'll have more services. The technology will diffuse into more industries.

And so, starting point is great models lead to great use, which leads to great growth. Brian Barrett: And I think the counterpoint of that too is great disasters in the cybersecurity space leads to more regulation, leads to clamping down on AI, which hurts Nvidia's growth.

So, the sort of let's have a security consortium, let's slow everybody's role here, is I think a protective play to say, let's avoid those sort of extreme moments that are going to cause a real crackdown on this industry and really slow the growth, on which, as we've said many times before, a big part of the US economy depends at this point.

Why it matters

So, it's less of a, here's what this means, but it is really touching so many hot wires in the AI world right now and making a lot of conversations that have been put off for a while come to a head. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I was, I will say, pretty surprised to see that big open letter that you alluded to.

What to watch

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it's like you could see this moment where OpenAI's agents kind of go rogue as a moment where the US government does clamp down and says, "This is really scary. " I think that the open weight, open source push is really an opportunity to say, "Actually, we need more growth.

" And basically the idea is these attacks are going to keep happening, whether intentionally or not, and US companies need every possible tool at their disposal to defend themselves.