Altman email defunds rivals, Nvidia locks Japan into CUDA, Current AI at 1%

Sources

Quoting Sam Altman simonwillison.net

We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded. — Sa…

What to watch for after Jensen Huang’s Japan visit techcrunch.com

Jensen Huang left Tokyo with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem.

Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all techcrunch.com

Current AI, a non-profit building AI that leaves no one culture behind, has made remarkable progress across devices, AI chat and more.

Can an Apple lawsuit derail OpenAI’s hardware plans? techcrunch.com

OpenAI’s push into consumer hardware and an eventual public offering faces a new drag from Apple’s lawsuit, according to a debate on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. The suit lands as OpenAI courts device partners and investors betting on a post-ChatGPT form factor.

I hate that I don’t hate this song made with Suno theverge.com

Generative music from Suno usually reads as boring filler, but 1010benja’s “Semiramis Dream” is forcing a rethink at The Verge. The piece sits alongside work by artists like Holly Herndon as evidence that AI tools can serve real songwriting rather than replace it.

‘Odyssey’ director Christopher Nolan calls AI an obvious ‘Trojan horse’ techcrunch.com

Christopher Nolan, promoting his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, likened AI’s arrival in Hollywood to the Greeks hidden in the wooden horse. “Everybody knows the Greeks are inside,” he told TechCrunch, framing studio adoption as a threat the industry sees coming but welcomes anyway.

References

StartupFortune — on Dean Ball (OpenAI Head of Strategic Futures) startupfortune.com

OpenAI’s Dean Ball calls open-weight AI a ‘dystopian hellscape’ and characterises open weights as ‘inherently decelerationist,’ warning they could lead to ‘full AI communism.’

Cornell Tech tip-sheet — David Gray Widder news.cornell.edu

Open source can be part of a larger strategy to ‘kneecap’ rivals by creating dependencies on a dominant firm’s infrastructure, rather than a straightforward driver of competition.

Open Markets Institute — FTC/DOJ AI inquiry openmarketsinstitute.org

The FTC has issued compulsory orders to OpenAI, Alphabet, and Anthropic to investigate how their partnerships and release strategies may distort innovation or create barriers to entry for smaller firms.

Wing VC — Open vs Proprietary AI history wing.vc

By mid-2023 the ‘monetizable spread’ between open and closed models began to shrink rapidly, with a leaked Google memo conceding ‘We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI.’

arXiv 2508.12461 — gpt-oss technical report arxiv.org

gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B were released in August 2025 under Apache 2.0, targeting 80GB and 16GB VRAM tiers for local consumer-hardware deployment.

Simon Willison — prior commentary simonwillison.net

For years Altman’s stance had placed OpenAI on ‘the wrong side of history’ regarding transparency and open weights.

Tom’s Hardware tomshardware.com

NVIDIA and Japan’s Noetra Consortium to build 140MW Rubin AI factory with 27,500 GPUs… 13,750 Vera CPUs paired with 27,500 Rubin GPUs, targeting operations by June 2028.

Kalkine (analyst roundup) kalkine.com

Huang’s Japan remarks that data-center costs could climb from $50 billion to $100 billion per gigawatt ignited fresh debate over a ‘deep contradiction’ in Nvidia’s model — driving up infrastructure costs for the very customers it seeks to empower.

Morningstar / Dow Jones morningstar.com

Seaport’s Jay Goldberg — the lone sell-rated analyst on the stock — warns of ‘circular deals’ where Nvidia invests in customers who then buy Nvidia hardware, and says demand persists because customers feel they ‘cannot afford not to’ buy.

TheCube Research (‘Sovereignty just grew a body’) thecuberesearch.com

Japan’s ‘sovereign’ stack is tethered to CUDA and NVL72 racks; true sovereignty would require hardware-agnostic platforms, whereas any ‘third option’ to US or Chinese AI remains fundamentally dependent on Nvidia’s silicon.

Zamin (summary of Nikkei / Diet coverage) zamin.uz

CDP lawmaker Yoshitaka Saito and the JCP have opposed the 2026 supplementary budget funding Noetra, arguing public ‘consensus is overwhelmingly insufficient’ — and noting SoftBank simultaneously pours ¥1.6 trillion into OpenAI while leading a ‘domestic’ consortium.

roic.ai (energy/nuclear analysis) roic.ai

Huang endorsed nuclear as vital for ‘AI Factories’ like the 140MW Noetra site and predicted hyperscalers may run their own SMRs within a decade; METI’s 7th Strategic Energy Plan targets ~20% nuclear by 2040, with 15 of 42 reactors already back online by mid-2026.

Unite.ai — ‘Current AI Starts Funding Its Open Alternative to Big Tech’ unite.ai

Only $3.2 million has been distributed to its first cohort of four grantees… a modest scale compared to the tens of billions being poured into private sector AI firms.

Current AI blog — Pilot Grant Cohort announcement currentai.org

Masakhane received $2.25 million to expand linguistic infrastructure for over 50 African languages; Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools for Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon; Institute for Worldmaking received $285,000.

AI Weekly — ‘Current AI Marshals $400M for Public AI Infrastructure Push’ aiweekly.co

Alpha Chat, a fully open-source chatbot built in seven weeks by a coalition including Mozilla and Hugging Face, specifically designed to use no proprietary model weights.

GitHub — currentai-org/suno-sutra-sw github.com

Embedded Linux device with camera, microphone, screen and speaker running specialized SUTRA models locally; supports 22+ Indic languages with token efficiency of 1.4–2.1 tokens per word vs. 4–8 for GPT-4-class models.

Briefs.co — ‘Nonprofit Startup Aims for Free Public AI Tools’ briefs.co

A nonprofit backed by the very companies it seeks to challenge — Google DeepMind and Salesforce sit alongside the French government’s $100M seed — may face inherent conflicts of interest.

Johns Hopkins CS — ‘Low-Resource, High-Risk’ cs.jhu.edu

Malicious prompts blocked in English often bypass guardrails when translated into languages like Maori or Armenian… systems optimized for English frequently fail to recognize calls for ethnic violence in Swahili.