Q&A: Nvidia genAI chief explains why open models matter in AI

What do open models really give enterprises and countries? “Open models allow enterprises and countries to own, inspect, and adapt models with their own data. The learning rate of adoption differs by region and enterprise, so there are different pockets of acceleration, but all the models have made tremendous progress closing the gap. What’s interesting about Nemotron is that we also publish our data, and that opened up a new world of engagement. 

“Enterprises reached out, saying, ‘Thank you, but I want to understand why you put this set of data out.’ That got them in the mindset that they could curate, create, capture, and control their own data.”

When you develop these open models, do you have CIOs in mind, or sovereign uses? Where does the rubber hit the road? “Both. At the highest level, it’s very much the same: use cases, data sets, outcomes you want to achieve. It used to be question and answer, now it’s agentic workloads, getting stuff done, calling tools. To get a task done, which tool do you call? That’s different for every enterprise and every local region, which is why we match local models to local ecosystems, with post-training on those local models.