> Nvidia has been using its newfound liquid funds to train its own family of models

Nvidia has always had its own family of models, it's nothing new and not something you should read too much into IMHO. They use those as template other people can leverage and they are of course optimized for Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia has been training models in the Megatron family as well as many others since at least 2019 which was used as blueprint by many players. [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08053

I think there are two things that happened

1. OpenAI bet largely on consumer. Consumers have mostly rejected AI. And in a lot of cases even hate it (can't go on TikTok or Reddit without people calling something slop, or hating on AI generated content). Anthropic on the other hand went all in on B2B and coding. That seems to be the much better market to be in.

2. Sam Altman is profoundly unlikable.

Yeah. Even if OpenAI models were the best, I still wouldn't used them, given how the Sam Altman persona is despicable (constantly hyping, lying, asking for no regulations, then asking for regulations, leaked emails where founders say they just wanna get rich without any consideration of their initial "open" claims...). I know other companies are not better, but at least they have a business model and something to lose.

Nvidia isn’t competing with OpenAI for frontier models.

And the whole AI craze is becoming nothing but a commodity business where all kinds of models are popping in and out, one better this update, the other better the next update etc. In short - they're basically indistinguishable for the average layman.

Commodity businesses are price chasers. That's the only thing to compete on when product offerings are similar enough. AI valuations are not setup for this. AI Valuations are for 'winner takes all' implications. These are clearly now falling apart.

"Largely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes Google and Amazon are making their own GPU chips, but they are also buying as many Nvidia chips as they can get their hands on. As are Microsoft, Meta, xAI, Tesla, Oracle and everyone else.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that about Anthropic. I guess it wouldn’t really make sense to compete with OpenAI and everyone else for Nvidia chips if they can avoid it.

OpenAI will keep using Nvidia GPUs but they may have to actually pay for them.

Nvidia had the chance to build its own AI software and chose not to. It was a good choice so far, better to sell shovels than go to the mines - but they still could go mining if the other miners start making their own shovels.

If I were Nvidia I would be hedging my bets a little. OpenAI looks like it's on shaky ground, it might not be around in a few years.

Would Nvidia investing heavily in ClosedAI dissuade others to use Nvidia?

Literally all the other companies that still believe they can be the leading ones one day?

Maybe xAI/Tesla, Meta, Palantir

It's almost as if everyone here was assuming that Nvidia would have no competition for a long time, but it has been known for a long time, there are many competitors coming after their data center revenues. [0]

> So which leading AI company is going to build on Nvidia, if not OpenAI?

It's xAI.

But what matters is that there is more competition for Nvidia and they bought Groq to reduce that. OpenAI is building their own chips as well as Meta.

The real question is this: What happens when the competition catches up with Nvidia and takes a significant slice out of their data center revenues?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45429514

The moment you threaten NVDA's livelyhood, your company starts to fall apart. History tells.

the chinese will probably figure out a way to sneak the nvidia chips around the sanctions

Yeah I see coreweave as a canary in the coal mine. They’re not doing so hot and basically got a bailout by Nvidia a few days ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/nvidia-invests-2b-to-help-...

Microsoft and Google's role in this does explain why they're so keen to push AI into their products, whether customers want it or not.

Coreweave acquired WandB last year. https://www.coreweave.com/blog/coreweave-completes-acquisiti... . Strategic.

And the loans given to nvidia, the collateral are old and rapidly discounting GPUs

I don’t think so. I think it is positioning for the unknown future and hedging.

For example, Amazon isn’t able to train its own models so it hedges by investing in Anthropic and OpenAI. Oracle, same with OpenAI deal. Nvidia wants to stay in OpenAI and Anthropic’s tech stack.

It’s all jockeying for position.

We know that it is all a grift before the inevitable collapse, so everyone is racing for the exit before that happens.

I guarrantee you that in 10 years time, you will get claims of unethical conduct by those companies only after the mania has ended (and by then the claimants have sold all their RSUs.)

This issue has one thumbs up, nobody cares about it.

I don't know what you're so surprised about. The ticket reads like any other typical [Big] enterprise ticket. UI works, headless - not (headless is what only hackers use, so not a priority, etc.) Oh, found the support guy who knows what headless is and the doc page with a number of workarounds. There is even ssh tunnel (how is that made in into enterprise docs?!) and the classic - copy logged in credentials from UI machine once you logged in there. Bla-bla-bla and again classic:

"Root Cause

The backend enforces an Enterprise-only entitlement for codex_device_code_auth on POST /backend-api/accounts/{account_id}/beta_features. Your account is on the Team plan, so the server rejects the toggle with {"detail":"Enterprise plan required."} "

and so on and so forth. At any given day i have several such long-term tickets that get ultimately escalated to me (i'm in dev and usually the guy who would pull the page with ssh tunnel or credentials copying :)

Funny that they can't just get the "AI" to fix it.

The model is the product. OpenAI themselves also build products on top of their models.

Those without models are hugely vulnerable to sudden rug pulls.

Hard to capture that value all in one place though.

I've thought about this too. I do agree that open source models look good and enticing, especially from a privacy standpoint. But these solutions are always going to remain niche solutions for power users. I'm not one of them. I can't be hassled/bothered to setup that whole thing (local or cloud) to gain some privacy and end up with an inferior model and tool. Let's not forget about the cost as well! Right now I'm paying for Claude and Gemini. I run out of Claude tokens real fast, but I can just keep on going using Gemini/GeminiCLI for absolutely no cost it seems like.

The closed LLMs with the biggest amount of users will eventually outperform the open ones too, I believe. They have a lot of closed data that they can train their next generation on. Especially the LLMs that the scientific community uses will be a lot more valuable (for everyone). So in terms of quality, the closed LLMs should eventually outperform the open ones, I believe, which is indeed worrisome.

I also felt anxious early december about the valuations, but, one thing remains certain. Compute is in heavy demand, regardless of which LLM people use. I can't go back to pre-AI. I want more and more and faster and faster AI. The whole world is moving that way it seems like. I'm invested into phsyical AI atm (chips, ram, ...) whose evaluations look decently cheap.

And Google and Microsoft have huge distribution advantages that OpenAI doesn’t. Google and Microsoft can add AI to their operating systems, browsers, and office apps that users are already using. OpenAI just has a website and a niche browser. To Google and Microsoft, AI is a feature, not a product.

this is the argument i continue to have with people. first mover isnt always an advantage - i think openai will be sold or pennies on these dollars someday (next 5 years after they run out of funding).

Google has data, TPUs, and a shitload of cash to burn

I doubt they care at all. It might even be a feature.

Well, they might have gotten a little wary from previous boom and bust cycles. Perhaps they are a bit wary about the economic sustainability of the whole AI thing. However, perhaps they also might be driven by greed at this point. Why not just constrain supply and increase margins whilst they are no real competitor?

Nothing wrong with not wanting to go bankrupt if the bubble pops. It isn’t an indicator, it’s risk management.

People talk about an AI bubble. What we actually have is a GPU bubble. NVidia makes really expensive GPUs for AI. Others also make GPUs.

Companies like Google produce and operate AI models largely using their own TPUs rather than NVidia's GPUs. We've seen the Chinese produce pretty competitive open models with either older NVidia GPUs or alternative GPUs because they are not allowed to buy the newer ones. And AMD, Intel and other chip makers are also eager to get in on the action. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. have their own chips as well (similar to Google). All the hyperscalers are moving away from NVidia.

And then Apple runs a non Intel and non NVidia based range of workstations and laptops that are pretty popular with AI researchers because the M series CPU/GPU/NPU is pretty decent value for running AI models. You see similar movement with ARM chips from Qualcomm and others. They all want to run AI models on phones, tablets, laptops. But without NVidia.

NVidia's bubble is about vastly overcharging for a thing that only they can provide. Their GPU chips have enormous margins relative to CPU chips coming out of the same/similar machines. That's a bubble. As soon as you introduce competition, the companies with the best price performance wins. NVidia is still pretty good at what they do. But not enough to justify an order of magnitude price/cost difference.

NVidia's success has been predicated on its proprietary software and instruction set (CUDA). That's a moat that won't last. The reason Google can use its own TPUs rather than CUDA is that it worked hard to get rid of their CUDA dependence. Same for the other hyperscalars. At this point they can do training and inference without CUDA/NVidia and its more cost effective.

The reason that this 100B deal is apparently being reconsidered is that it is a bad deal for OpenAI. It was going to overpay for a solution that they can get cheaper elsewhere. It's bad news for NVidia, good news for OpenAI. This deal started out with just NVidia. But at this point there are also deals with AMD, MS, and others. OpenAI like the other hyperscalers is not betting the company on NVidia/CUDA. Good for them.

garbing popcorn

I would love it if AI fizzled out and nvidia had to go back to making gaming cards. Just trying to have a simple life here and play video games, and ridiculous hype after hype keeps making it expensive.

Idk about this news specifically but oracle cds prices are moving. The below link says 30k layoffs may hit Oracle which I feel is a bit hyperbolic so this article may not be grounded in reality.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/oracle_td_cowen_note/

Edit: Another src https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-3...

sadly micron/sandisk bubble is going full steam ahead

That's Sam Altman's wet dream: to get out of this with lots of cash and headache-free when the bubble bursts.

Not for all the players. Not everyone has over-raised their fundamentals.

Too important to what? The bubble?

Important for what? Google and anthropic's models are already better, and google actually makes money, and both are US companies. What strategic relevance is there to Open AI?

Is it? What do they have that Google and Anthropic do not at this point?

that is his character