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NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem
- datadrivenangel 1y agoSuggest changing the title to: NSF and NVIDIA award Ai2 $152M to support building a fully open AI ecosystem To better indicate that this is not related to OpenAI and that the group intends to release everything needed to train their models.
- nativeit 1y agoNow where have I heard this before…
- hobofan 1y agoIf Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the most closed part of the whole stack right now.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThat's AMDs fault, not Nvidia's.
- hobofan 1y agoAMD is incompetent on the ecosystem layer, but Nvidia has certainly been acting malicious. I've laid out my thesis at length in past comments, which I don't care to repeat, but the gist is: During the ~2010-2014 period (the time where the ecosystem gap really widened), Nvidia purposfully didn't implement OpenCL 2.0 while pushing CUDA, which made cross-platform solutions uncompetitive.
- kookamamie 1y agoIndeed. This is throwing pennies in virtue-signaling openness.
- sounds 1y agoNvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.
- arthurcolle 1y agoWhy is OpenAI a threat to Nvidia? They are still highly dependent on those GPUs
- tomrod 1y agoTwo concepts - Monopsony is the inverse of Monopoly -- one buyer. Walmart is often a monopsony for suppliers (exclusive or near exclusive). - Desire for vertical integration and value extraction, related to #1 but with some additional nuances
- next_xibalba 1y agoWho is the one buyer in the Nvidia scenario? How would that benefit Nvidia?
- KaoruAoiShiho 1y agoIt would hurt nvidia not benefit, that's why nvidia spends a lot of effort to prevent that from happening, and it's not the case currently. They really need to avoid the situation in the console market, where the fact there's only 3 customers means almost no margins on console chips.
- next_xibalba 1y agoPrior to the A.I. boom, Nvidia had a much, much more diverse customer base in terms of revenue mix. According to their 2015 annual report[1], their revenues were spread across the following revenue segments: gaming, automotive, enterprise, HPC and cloud, and PC and mobile OEMs. Gaming was the largest segment and contributed less than 50% of revenues. At this time, with a diverse customer base, their gross margins were 55.5%. (This is a fantastic gross margin in any industry outside software). In 2025 (fiscal year), Nvidia only reported two revenue segments: compute and networking ($116B revenue) and graphics ($14.3B revenue). Within the compute and networking segment, three customers represented 34% of all revenue. Nvidia's gross margins for fiscal 2025 were 75% [2]. In other words, this hypothesis doesn't fit at all. In this case, having more concentration in extremely deep pocketed customers competing over a constrained supply of product has caused margins to sky rocket. Moreover, GP's claim of monopsony doesn't make any sense. Nvidia is not at any risk of having a single buyer, and with the recent news that sales to China will be allowed, the customer base is going to become more diverse, creating even more demand for their products. [1] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual/2015/2015_NVDA_Annual_Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/annual... [2] https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/annual/NVIDIA-2025-Annual-Report.pdf https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/a...
- sim7c00 1y agoyou are not wrong. open up cuda would be a a real power move. i think ppl would mind a some of their other crap practices a lot less.
- colechristensen 1y agoThey could also publish all of their source code, die designs, put their patents in the public domain and go live on a beach somewhere and fish for a living. CUDA is what they sell, it makes more sense for them to charge for hardware and give the hardware-locked software away for free.
- latchkey 1y agoCame here to say this. It is the basis for my entire business. It isn't just CUDA though, it is the hardware layer too. That is why we are exclusive to AMD AI hardware. We have dozens of companies building foundational models and they all target a single vendor to supply all the hardware? Make it make sense! Yes, I know models run on AMD too, but the fact is, Nvidia, who's clearly doing a great job, is a literal monopoly. We need viable alternatives. This deal was done with CirraScale, who are great people. It is important to point out that they are also one of the 13 official AMD Cloud Partners. I'm on the list too.
- emsign 1y agoThat's because nvidia is in the business of selling chips and compute time. All they care bout is that as much people on Earth become dependend on AI running on nvidia hw as possible.
- brunohaid 1y agoMaybe that'll help them hire someone who can at least respond to S2 API key requests... Being open is great, but if over the course of 6 months 3 different entities (including 2 well known universities) apply and send more than a dozen follow ups to 3 different "Reach out to us!" emails with exactly 0 response, the "open" starts sounding like it's coming from Facebook.
- zoobab 1y ago"Open" like an open source FPGA implementation of their chips?
- pmdr 1y agoSo basically nvidia handing out cash to itself. <insert Obama medal meme>
- lgats 1y agoor handing out free hardware? with the side effect of investing in open source llms in their ecosystem
- jocaal 1y agoNvidia's market value is pumped due to hype. They can use this value to raise enormous amounts of capital and make investments that boost their earnings. This impresses investors, and the cycle continues.
- jeffreysmith 1y agoNot sure what's with the HN tone on this announcement. AI2 are really some of the best people around for creating truly open artifacts for the whole ecosystem. Their work on OLMo and Molmo is some of the most transparent and educational material you can find on model building. This is just great news for everyone.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Guthur 1y agoMaybe because many of us are not from the US. The stated goal is US dominance of the AI field, and sorry if the rest of us don't see that as a good thing nor particularly open.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>The stated goal is US dominance of the AI field Any country tries to dominate any field if they can do it, it's just human nature. Why is that a bad thing? That constant competition for superiority between nations is how humanity has evolved from hunter gatherer to having tractors, microwave ovens, airplanes, internet and penicillin.
- byteknight 1y agoAs an American, I obviously can get behind it, but I can easily see how a declared goal of superiority of others would rub those others the wrong way (and possibly prevent their contribution) [Insert xkcd new standard image here]
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>a declared goal of superiority of others would rub those others the wrong way So what? Does that change anything in how things work in reality? Everyone knows it, so why pussyfoot around it?. Why are people nowadays so sensitive about saying the truth of how things work? Have people been coddled that much that they've can't handle reality? A good life lesson is that the world does not revolve around your feelings.
- thefaux 1y ago[flagged]
- khalic 1y agoYou probably need to look under the hood, it has nothing to do with what popular culture called AI until very recently. It’s just a word generator on steroids, don’t believe the hype about AIs taking over, it’s complete BS.
- winter_blue 1y agoFwiw, the difference it makes in software development speed is astounding.
- khalic 1y agoI know first hand, quite incredible
- chvid 1y agoExactly why is that? Surely llms have use beyond pure destruction (unlike a nuclear weapon).
- emsign 1y agoTheir energy and ground water needs are purely destructive. I make a pass on their suppossed benefits.
- Difwif 1y agoYou're right. It's time to ban the evil numbers from being matrix multiplied. Contact your local representative about CPU control.
- mattigames 1y agoVery funny, the problem is more about the input than whatever the CPU is doing, as in chatGPT would be no more than a footnote without copyrighted material in all it's datasets.
- khalic 1y agoPeople seem to be missing the fact that Ai2 is an initiative by the Allen Institute for AI, not a company
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoAnd they've already released open source models, with data and training code. They're definitely the good guys here.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoI can’t wait until I can run this shit locally without spending $10,000 on clusters of GPU’s. The models will be trained using some distributed P2P-like technology that “The Man” can’t stop. Imagine running a model trained by the degenerates on 4chan. Models that encourage you to cheat on your homework, happily crank out photos of world leaders banging farm animals, and gleefully generate the worst gore imaginable. And best of all, any junior high schooler on the planet can do it. That’s how you know this technology has arrived. None of this sanitized, lawyer approved, safety weenie certified, three letter agency authorized nonsense we have now. Until it’s all local, it’s just an extension of the existing regime.
- philipkglass 1y agoImagine running a model trained by the degenerates on 4chan. It has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT4-Chan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT4-Chan https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16 https://archive.org/details/gpt4chan_model_float16
- latchkey 1y agoOnly $10k? We spend a lot more than that! =)
- jeffWrld 1y ago[dead]
- yalogin 1y agoAfter reading through the article I couldn't understand what an open AI ecosystem is. Are they talking about hardware or software? If it's software we have opensource models, are they going to create open source vertical integrations?
- curious_cat_163 1y agoWe don't really have very many open source models. We have "open weights" models. Ai2 is one of the very few labs that actually make their entire training/inference code AND datasets AND training run details public. So, that this investment is happening is a welcome step. Congratulations to the team at Ai2!
- yalogin 1y agoAh thanks for the nuance!
- gigatexal 1y agoI guess that makes sense: make Nvidia hardware run stuff so well you buy more of it. That’s all CUDA is it’s a way to get people to buy more CUDA capable hardware aka Nvidia cards.
- big_toast 1y agoSome people will be too young to know the commoditize[1] your complements wisdom of yesteryear. It's hard for me to tell if consumers end up net ahead after things settle. I'm surprised we haven't heard about OpenAI pushing a facebook style OpenCompute project or ARM (acorn, apple, VLSI) or similar for the stack below them. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- nativeit 1y agoAre we sure this isn’t Nvidia’s play to make what OpenAI is for Microsoft? Start with a bunch of non-profit, research-for-the-good-of-humanity promises before closing ranks and soliciting venture capital for its for-profit subsidiary? I don’t want to be cynical, it’s just that the world has left very few options otherwise.