NVIDIA open-sources its models because it needs to understand AI deeply to build the right hardware, and because its business grows whenever AI grows — this is a long-term strategy, not a science project or charity, and NVIDIA expects it to pay off the way CUDA did after a decade.

The first is that NVIDIA needs to understand AI deeply to build the right hardware for it. To design future chips, you have to know where AI is going. The best way to really know is to build models yourself and put them in front of real users. A model kept private is easy to fool yourself about, so releasing it openly keeps the work honest and keeps NVIDIA's researchers connected to the wider community they learn from. The second reason is about the business. NVIDIA grows whenever AI grows. Its goal is to support the ecosystem, not to compete with the companies building on top of it. Every team that adopts open models and builds its own AI can become a future customer for compute. So the company would rather hand the ecosystem the models and let the world's demand for AI pull its business forward. The VP pointed to CUDA, which took more than a decade before the rest of the world understood why it mattered. NVIDIA stuck with it, and it became the foundation of the company. He expects open models to follow the same path. As he put it, this is not a science project, and it is not charity. It is how NVIDIA moves itself forward into the future.

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