New Battle for the Future of Open Weights Models

Hey guys! So we’re living in interesting times.

In some of my recent videos I talked about the fact that the current geopolitical situation will force smaller players to support open weight LLMs, to fight the US dominance. China is already doing it, already playing this card, and smaller players will join and probably support some kind of government-neutral open weight LLMs.

But now it’s even more interesting, because this weekend NVIDIA came up with an initiative to support open weight models. I don’t remember exactly the details, but the idea is to support the development of open weight models and not to block them.

And this is a counter-initiative to what Anthropic has been doing in the last couple of — I think — months. Basically, Anthropic in the last year or year and a half became the leader in this field, a leader in LLMs and in AI agents, and they are trying to fixate their leadership position by introducing regulations. So now they want all the models to go through safety checks, and they’re talking about safety and blah, blah, blah. I mean, they probably care — they do care about safety, and I believe them 100% — but from aside it looks like they’re just trying to use it more as an excuse to slow down everyone else, and to ensure that they’re staying at the top and no one can actually get up to them. So they’re coming up with these initiatives of introducing censorship and safety checks which, de facto, again, slow down everyone else.

And this hurts directly the NVIDIA business model, which is — NVIDIA is in the business of selling GPUs. So now NVIDIA comes up with this initiative of supporting open weight models.

And what’s interesting is that all the other commercial players actually joined them, joined them against Anthropic. OpenAI, I believe, was there. xAI. Google to some extent, or DeepMind, or whichever Google body it was.

And it’s very interesting to watch, because these guys want to be leaders as well. So no one wants Anthropic to be at the top, and Anthropic wants to stay there. So we’ll see how it develops.