> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand
Not speaking on behalf of my employer and I have no insight into this strategy at all, but I feel like the sale of consumer GPUs is so small by comparison to data centers (more than 10x from what I can tell online) that more users of open weights wouldn't likely make much difference in the earnings report.
There’s no reason to believe that companies running open weights models would use consumer hardware. I can speak on behalf of my employer and say that we’d vastly prefer to have enterprise grade servers running inference on premises.
Not consumer demand. I was assuming that it's Nvidia's interest that intelligence is not only in a couple of frontier lab's hands, or they can choke the demand to suit their needs. If any company can access a frontier model without going through the frontier labs, the ecosystem will be larger and healthier for everyone, including Nvidia.
I think the vast majority of gpu’s serving open models are in those data centers
Open weights models in the data center are more important than on consumer devices.
In the future, even consumers will launch weights and fine tunes they own in the cloud.
People don't own the fiber to their home, so why should they expect to run the GPUs? If they want smart coding and video models, they'll need H200s and B200s, and they'll need to rent them.
counterpoint: I have smart coding at this very second, and I am running it on 128GB of ddr4 with a 16GB gpu. (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next).
I expect to continue to have this, and more, as smaller models become even more capable. I also expect hardware prices to resume going down once the supply crunch ends.
I see no need to stop owning things or change my expectations around ownership, nor will I accept something like that.