Interconnects: Jensen's resignation is a major setback for US open-model ecosystem
Interconnects (Nathan Lambert) · rss · 2026-11-14
Nathan Lambert argues Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's resignation is a serious blow to the US open-weight model ecosystem:
Jensen's role
- Nvidia's operations famously depend on Jensen; more departures (chip-smuggling probes, talent poaching) are plausible, and the funding flood behind his founder-style open-model bet will likely dry up.
Open model economy
- Upside: the ecosystem has correctly latched onto "ownership of intelligence" and enterprise post-training.
- Downside: with compute scarce (Anthropic/OpenAI buying up capacity), open models are far from commoditized — DeepInfer showed open-weight models still sell at high inference margins, so vertically integrated closed labs will win near-term.
Regulation risk
- Biggest worry: sloppy state-level regulation from "open-weight hawks" who see open models as unsafe; the US has been one strong Chinese open-weight model away from a crisis since summer.
- Lambert also notes media dynamics: timing (right after midterms), not new information, took Jensen down — echoing the summer Jacob Coxon cycle.
The way out
- Only lasting fix: incubate a frontier open-model player in the US. Quoting Dylan Patel: it's a talent problem, not money — Moonshot matches US labs on skill, lacking only compute/deployment; Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small is the best Western open-weight model in a while but still far behind Kimi K3.1 Pro, with Zhipu's next GLM highly anticipated. Likely allies: hyperscaler CEOs like Zuckerberg, Jassy, or Nadella.
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