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NVIDIA is one of the most open labs. They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin... Which other lab shares this? Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN). There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.

>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA. [0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...

Nvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets. Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others. I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware. I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.

As a AMD GPU user, I feel as if trying to mandate CUDA only or some other way to increase NVIDIA lock in like that would be met with people leaving the platform or at lest simply working on the non NVIDIA formats away from hugging face. Though requiring a lot of space it's quite easy to spin up a competitor at least for hosting weights. And if they try some legal shenanigans then many countries outside the US will still be happy to host I am sure why not China? The only thing I can see them being able to get away with is increasingly bending the hugging face python API and any other features of that sort they develop to NVIDIA only. I personally don't use that and don't see a reason to and I am not sure how many people do use the hugging face python library.

> Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. Their strategy for AI is pretty clear and they bank on on-premises OSS models for the busines, with their really cool open-source software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmcn1-jFLWY This is a really good watch and is a glimpse into what the actual future shapes up to be considering the current situation in where the OSS Chinese models successfully compete with proprietary US ones.