No, we are just seeing a push towards Nvidia wanting to make money.

Nothing stops you from giving Nvidia half a million for their latest and greatest AI GPUs, unless you are in China I guess, but China does very well despite the export control.

It is just classic market segmentation, the thing Nvidia and just about every company that can benefit from it has done for decades. Cloud providers are ready to pay a lot of money, consumers wanting local AI have a lower budget, and gamers even lower. But a low budget is greater than zero, and there is still money to be made on these markets. But they also don't want to compete against themselves, so they are going to find ways of crippling enterprise-class workloads on consumer hardware.

It used to be that they crippled high precision arithmetic on consumer hardware, because it was a differentiating factor, but AI doesn't care about high precision, so now, it is something else.

NVIDIA probably already figured out that local will be massive part and are preparing to do DRM for AI.

Pay up for license to unlock full capacity, pay up for license to use encrypted models from AI moguls, paid per billion tokens processed or just operations in GPU

The reason why open source couldn't win search and social was because they need network effects which is not possible for open source maintainers.

AI is a software just like operating systems and executables where open source absolutely dominates the industry. Remember when the compiler engineers optimized the shit out of llama.cpp.

Right now the bottleneck for AI software is compute and data. Moore's law is give us compute, StackOverflow, arXiv (and it's children like bioRxiv), gutenberg and others (3lib, anna, internet.org) will give us data.

It's a waiting game. Open source always wins.

Years ago I would think I was being paranoid to think they would patch hardware retroactively to make it slower so you need to pay more to use your own hardware. In 2026, I think this is what all car companies are doing after you pay the full car price. I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do it with so little competition

> Are we actually seeing a push towards being 100percent dependent on the cloud?

[Hanlon's Razor] This is such a contrived performance drop scenario that I find it hard to believe it was done with the purpose you're inferring.

I'd interpret this as Nvidia not caring that much about Linux desktops/laptops once again (as opposed to Windows desktops/laptops), rather than anything to do with local vs cloud.

Yes? How is this at all surprising given....everything we've seen tech companies push for for years and years? People are fully embedding themselves and their workflows in the services of big, closed companies, and are going to be surprised when they finally feel able to clamp down? There has been warning sign after warning sign, but people are only increasing their dependence.

> Build and maintain sovereign AI while you still can.

As in, make your own inference and training hardware?

Yes, in everything.

I stopped using my laptop for dev and switched to talking to claude code on my phone and as you can imagine I am faster at producing code.

100% cloud with a single entry point device to manage dedicated servers + agents

Remember this is the same company that stopped GTX/RTX users from hardware encoding more than 2 video streams at the same time

This is classical move from Nvidia. They are doing similiar bullshits on their GPUs for decades. I'm very much looking forwars for their competition to rise.

New generations such as Blackwell have open source kernel modules, there is not even a proprietary option. I thought there was a move in this direction?

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t...

It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.

how are they going to sell you a subscripton to overclock your GPU otherwise?

> we've allowed a company

When did "we" have a say in this? I don't get these types of comments from the "open-source as a community."

Nvidia has been doing this for decades, and there are two possible arguments:

1. They are successful despite it.

2. They are successful because of it.

There is no mythical collective "we" representing the open-source community in Nvidia's supply chain of success. It's Nvidia and its consumers.

Please be aware that you have been the target of foreign anti-AI influence campaigns. Your comment history makes it clear they have had a strong negative effect on you.

> sparks my interest

I see what you did there. ;)

Enumerating 3 things really ..sparks a comment nowadays? Doing that as a rhetorical device has been a thing for generations and of course LLMs mimic it because it is everywhere in their training data.

I just heard a quick J. Talarico speech at some country concert. In the 10 or so sentences he spoke, he had 3 or 4 instances of doing this "Claudism" enumeration. Are you saying Texas just elected Claude for Senate?

Maybe we should stop with such superficial judgements. It's the modern equivalent of not liking the speaker's tie. (Doesn't mean the speaker's speech is good, but it doesn't mean it's bad either.)

Not really, because for more than 2 decades the closed-source NVIDIA Linux drivers were at parity of features and performance with the Windows drivers, unlike the AMD drivers before they were open-sourced, which was much more recently.

This is a new thing with the firmware that can be used only by Windows. If this NVIDIA policy continues, then NVIDIA will indeed become a bad choice for Linux, but until now, for graphics and AI applications NVIDIA has been the best choice for Linux, by providing the best performance and reliability.

For pure computational applications, especially for those requiring good FP64 throughput, there are many years since NVIDIA has become a worse choice than AMD and more recently also than Intel, but that is due to poor hardware support, not to bad software support.

Looks like the site has fixed the title.

Good point, fixed, thanks.

As someone who went down the rabbit hole of local AI, there is so much exhausting debugging already. Even if this is "just" another step you have to find, it's toxic.

I though the same, reverse engineer with AI. Even run the AI on the laptop and have it reverse-engineer itself.

Not everyone grew up in a situation where home was a stable dependable place. Not everyone has a home to go to. If you have it with you, they can't mess with it or take it away from you when you're not there. If you grew up in a broken home, you would understand.

Because maybe you don't want to send your private data to a company that could use it for whatever it wants?

The RTX Spark is also sold in a mac mini form factor. That's pretty well suited for home inference.

private memory.

unique local data and know how not shared with cloud.

I have been saying this for years, and the answer hits a nerve that gets you downvoted into oblivion: people prefer the aesthetics of laptops, simple as that. They will absolutely go to the grave arguing that they need the mobility etc, then just leave it plugged in. They simply prefer how laptops look, and they absolutely hate it when someone dares say it.

Agreed, i bet they will fix this quickly to help sell more units

You probably won't be able to run a sota model on a single Talaas card. You probably need a set. It should theoretically be cheaper, faster, more power efficient than Nvidia at running that model. But then you are stuck with a chip that can run only that model. And I understand that context size will also be a problem.

The attack on reverse engineering of games is a precursor to universal computing lockdown. When you need AI to keep up with programming, the entity controlling the AI controls what software is possible to create. It’s a bid for centralised control and thought censorship at a scale and depth much more ambitious than anything we have ever seen before.

Sovereign AI has never been more important.

> conniptions

TIL. Nice word.

Do you know that 1 + 1 = 10 in binary?

You're not supposed to want to buy one (https://www.osnews.com/story/146277/sam-altman-wants-to-take...)