ジェンスン不在のオープンソースAI

Open Source AI Without Jensen was published on Saturday, November 14, 2026. A decapitation. It's time to rebuild. The resignation of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong is a major setback for the U.S. development of an open model ecosystem. NVIDIA still has the financial interest in supporting open models, which are to avoid concentration of power among a few customers who would develop their own chips and reduce NVIDIA's profits. But supporting the open ecosystem is a tricky puzzle more than an engineering problem to grind out a solution on. NVIDIA's business operations are famously extremely dependent on Jensen as an operator, so it is a consensus opinion that there are challenges ahead, or even more high-profile departures through chip-smuggling investigations or plain old shark-circling, more poachable talent. NVIDIA's number one goal is to stabilize the ship, deliver to customers in the next 24 months, and prevent implosion. Open models 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.

In this period, the open model economy is in its nascency. These are crucial years for establishing use cases, revenue flow, and motives to continue training the next generation model. I discussed the sensitivity of these early years in my recent talk at Fireworks Forge. Click through to see the slides or the recording. The core of the argument is one upside for open models, a reason to be optimistic, and one downside. The positive case is that the open model economy is correctly latched onto, quote, ownership of intelligence and enterprise post-training as a crucial lane. What is to be determined is exactly how big the downstream market is. The downside is that the true long-term benefit of open models, as truly commoditized intelligence, is very far from realization with compute and such short supply. In the near term where inference startups are also struggling to get enough chips there little margin competition on open models If open source models are also served at giant inference margins as we learned with DeepSeek Deep and Fur release, they're far from a commodity. In this paradigm, the closed labs with better economies

of scale and integration from model to data center and chips will win. I expanded on this challenge in my recent piece on the open model economy. Together, a lot still needs to go right for open models to be a meaningful economic engine. Jensen's support and protection gave the ecosystem time to figure this out. Jensen was more than a cheerleader. He would stop a lot of shit from going wrong once early winds were stirring. He was willing to use his power on open models. There's a major swell in democratic government funding towards candidates that want to regulate the AI industry fostering safety. Many of these people feel a need to do something and have general opinions that open models are unsafe, while not being educated on the complexities of the benefits. My biggest near-term worry is sloppy regulation at the state level, followed by national regulation. We've been one strong Chinese open-weight model away from a crisis since the summer. It still holds, especially as we enter a new turbulent equilibrium of cybersecurity. We have not seen a major hack driven by a popular Chinese open-weight model, but it's a matter of when, not if. We need someone

to encourage caution in an ecosystem perspective when the open-weight hawks come hunting. Knocking over the open source AI domino today is easy. If done, unwinding the downstream concentration of power, reduction in safety research, and stifling of long-term innovation is far harder. On public data, it looks like balancing long-term innovation versus short-term risks, but this is due to how horribly hard it is to measure the open model economy, e.g. the most valuable aspects of it run on private infrastructure. It's a recurring challenge facing the ecosystem in my work. As a brief aside the extent to which the media ecosystem is revolving around timing today rather than the exact availability of information is incredible All of these Jensen affairs were known but getting them out at the right time right after the midterms took down the king The same goes for the Jacob Cox and Brouhaha this summer. All of the safety culture around the top labs was well known, but the right timing around data centers and the Overton window made it a national issue. This could very well happen at

at some point for open model safety, as it tends to be harm, risk, or safety-related narratives that drive this massive media ecosystem. I cannot imagine my work on open science driving such a media cycle, because it will never happen. The only lasting solution to this is to incubate a truly frontier open model player in the U.S. For example, I agree completely with Dylan Patel, CEO of Semi-Analysis, on a core problem in the U.S. model ecosystem. From a recent China Talk semi-analysis emergency podcast quote jordan schneider i do want your guys take on how bad this is that jents is now off the table for the future of american innovation and we should talk about open models i mean he was the big champion right dylan you were talking earlier i don't still don't understand quite why someone didn't just spend a few billion dollars make something better than kimmy or deep seek and open source it dylan patel not that easy it's not money it's talent all the most talented people primarily work in anthropic opening eye deep mind and meta right And then those who don't are split across a hundred different startups.

I mean, yes, Thinking Machines has a crack team, but is Thinking Machines as good as Moonshot? No. Moonshot skill-wise is probably just as good as the U.S. labs. They just have a big deficit in compute and deployment. So I think if we don't have a scale advantage, then you don't win. Yes, those smaller labs have spent a lot of money on models, but DeepMind, Grok, and Meta have regularly fallen behind the frontier of Chinese labs, and they're spending more. So it not just oh spend a few billion dollars and you can make a model that better End quote The best people for attracting talent are the ones at the front of movements Jensen helped catalyze this and on many metrics was still losing Nemetron has the right level of ambition and strong people, but it hasn't delivered to the point of being called mission accomplished. The competition here in building leading edge models is more fierce than most give credit to. Having an organization with billions of dollars, solid people, and good vibes may not get you there. You normally need something special. It could be the case that Thinking Machines has gotten to maturity in its commitment to open models, with its recent inkling too small being the best Western open-weight model in a while.

Still, it's far behind Kimmy K3.1 Pro, and expectations are high for Zipu's next GLM update. It's a better sign that we're at least having this debate, but the open ecosystem is riddled with questions and answers like, maybe they could pull it off? On the other side of the equation, closed labs like Anthropic look like they're some of the greatest businesses ever assembled, which inspires confidence in the longevity of their approach. Who is Mira going to call when they need to close their next funding round? Supposedly the next round at a $40 billion valuation is a done deal, but that won't be enough to keep pace with the closed frontier. The fundamental problem is that the open-weight ecosystem needs someone who will pick up the phone to abate a crisis. There are more challenges ahead. The most likely allies we could turn to are from the hyperscalers, the likes of Zuckerberg, Anti-Jassy, or Satya. With such a coordinated campaign of pressure from the AI safety community that has opened models as a negative target, I worry that being proactive is the only way to stay ahead. Jensen has carried that mantle for about two years, and times were messy before he stepped up clearly in 2025.

We're regressing in the operational capability of our movement when the stakes and attacks are destined to rise. We open model believers are due some soul-searching and coalition building to construct a new platform. Shoes have been emptied that will never be fully refilled. Thanks for listening and have a great day.