Lambert: Jensen's Exit Is a Setback for US Open-Source AI

Nathan Lambert calls Jensen Huang's departure from Nvidia 'a major setback for the US development of an open model ecosystem.' The argument, laid out in Interconnects, rests on one claim: Huang was writing the checks no one else was.

'Jensen was more than a cheerleader,' Lambert writes. 'He would stop a lot of shit from going wrong once early winds were stirring.' Open models, he adds, 'have been one of Jensen's more ambitious, founder-style bets. He has been flooding the zone with funding in a way that will very likely dry up.'

The second worry is structural. 'Nvidia's business operations are famously extremely dependent on Jensen as an operator, so it is a consensus opinion that there are challenges ahead.' The implication Lambert draws: a post-Jensen Nvidia will spend its next stretch stabilizing the core business, not placing founder-style side bets on open-weight labs.

Lambert then brings in Dylan Patel on why money alone will not close the gap. 'Not that easy. It's not money, it's talent, man. All of the most talented people primarily work at Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.' Even an unnamed company's 'next round at a $40B valuation,' Lambert writes, is not obviously enough to keep pace with the closed frontier.

On the US-China gap he is blunter: 'DeepMind, Grok, Meta have regularly fallen behind the frontier of Chinese labs, and they're spending more.' Lambert's framing is that supporting the open ecosystem 'is a tricky puzzle more than an engineering problem,' and that no one else is obviously positioned to take it on. The piece lands inside a busy week of our Jensen Huang coverage and the broader open-source tracker.