> Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going
They're releases so far have been kind of lackluster compared to Qwen and other Chinese models. My suspicion is that Nvidia won't be releasing models that appear to compete with frontier models because that would upset their big customers.
Nvidia's future incentives are not clear to me. Their big customers are actively working to develop custom silicon, see e.g. "Open"AI's Broadcom announcement. The more independence their whale customers attain, the more attractive cutting them off at the knees and selling sovereign AI inference hardware directly to businesses and consumers becomes.
This is pure speculation, but I have a hunch that the Nemotron line is intended as a shot across the bow, and that's why its capabilities have been strong but not quite open-frontier level.