Open weights are real and now a threat Nvidia can't ignore: Jensen's first-ever post is a sign the world has changed, and as a component manufacturer Nvidia must dance between frontier and open customers — open doesn't need CUDA, open is cheaper and lower-margin, and open will bypass Nvidia.
Jason reads Jensen Huang's first-ever X post — an open-weights manifesto signed by Microsoft, Meta, IBM and others — as proof that open weights have become real. He explains that Nvidia is a component manufacturer forced to 'dance' between frontier labs and open-source customers, and that open weights are dangerous to Nvidia because they bypass CUDA, are cheaper, and carry lower margins. ✦ AI generated
Jason · 20VC · 2026-07-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:05
“How did we analyze Jensen's first post and what it means for the open versus closed debate?”
This open letter, the first tweet ever, right, is clearly a sign the world's changed. And I think if if Nvidia had its brothers and none of us have we don't get to own 25% of Nvidia today. We don't get to own 30% none of us get our brothers but Nvidia's brothers would probably be the 2027 uh revenue and scale of AI but the 2024 2025 world where there's only where they can charge what the maximum to just a couple customers but that's not the world today. they have competition from their own c top customers right and we will see over the next 6 to 12 months how big a deal open weights and open source are I have a lot of thoughts I don't think Kimmy 3 for me is any better I don't see any cost advantages but putting that aside if almost half of open router's traffic is to open source openweight models it's left the stable so as wildly successful as he's got to do a dance right this is a constant dance and I've sold components in my career it's a dance you're trying to make everybody happy. Everyone wants Everyone wants price cuts from the component manufacturer and they want exclusivity. You can't do it. He's got to go in both dance halls now, right? He's got to go frontier and open and open is dangerous. Open doesn't need CUDA. Open is cheaper and it's lower margins. Open will bypass him, but uh he's got to he's got that's his job. Like it's not that as as incredible as Nvidia is, it's still a component manufacturer. [laughter] It's got the a lot of lot of a lot of stresses and uh and so it just it's just the next level. It's if we didn't know last week if this open weights open source stuff was really real and and outside of X you could debate how important it is. It's clear now. It's clear now. Nvidia is all behind it, right? First tweet in first tweet in in since the 1900s. Like it's pretty clear.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:05
2:05and what it means for the open versus closed debate? This open letter, the first tweet ever, right, is clearly a sign the world's changed. And I think if if Nvidia had its brothers and none of us have we don't get to own 25% of Nvidia today. We don't get to own 30% none of us get our brothers but Nvidia's brothers would probably be the 2027 uh revenue and scale of AI but the 2024
2:282025 world where there's only where they can charge what the maximum to just a couple customers but that's not the world today. they have competition from their own c top customers right and we will see over the next 6 to 12 months how big a deal open weights and open source are I have a lot of thoughts I don't think Kimmy 3 for me is any better
2:46I don't see any cost advantages but putting that aside if almost half of open router's traffic is to open source openweight models it's left the stable so as wildly successful as he's got to do a dance right this is a constant dance and I've sold components in my career it's a dance you're trying to make everybody happy. Everyone wants Everyone wants price cuts from the component manufacturer and they want
3:09exclusivity. You can't do it. He's got to go in both dance halls now, right? He's got to go frontier and open and open is dangerous. Open doesn't need CUDA. Open is cheaper and it's lower margins. Open will bypass him, but uh he's got to he's got that's his job. Like it's not that as as incredible as Nvidia is, it's still a component manufacturer. [laughter] It's got the a lot of lot of a lot of
3:31stresses and uh and so it just it's just the next level. It's if we didn't know last week if this open weights open source stuff was really real and and outside of X you could debate how important it is. It's clear now. It's clear now. Nvidia is all behind it, right? First tweet in first tweet in in since the 1900s. Like it's pretty clear. >> You're right, Jason. The open open stuff
3:55is real. And while in public um anthropic are saying we don't want to ban open weight the truth is the combination of saying we don't want to sell stuff to China chips to China we can argue both sides of that actually second we want to really punish people for distillation right and then the third point they made is we want some kind of regulatory process to approve models right that's