Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models — that is, models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure — could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t waiting to find out. On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Signatories included Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, but the loudest voice among them was Nvidia. Of course it was. Nvidia has the most to lose. In his first-ever post to the social network formerly known as Twitter, Huang touted the letter arguing that open models “strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.” He added, “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Why? Nvidia’s future depends on a healthy and diverse ecosystem of models. As any good arms dealer knows, the best way to guarantee profits is to sell to both sides. But if the US restricts Chinese open-weights models, American customers' options become mediocre US models, or proprietary and increasingly expensive ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Nvidia’s addressable market shrinks and its ability to grow diminishes. What good are all these “AI factories” that Nvidia has helped prop up in that case? As we wrote last week, the US hasn’t invested in open weights models to the same extent as the Chinese model houses. For enterprises unwilling or unable to use proprietary models, models from the likes of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Z.AI, and Moonshot (Kimi) are the only credible alternatives. Thinking Machine Labs’ nearly-billion-parameter Inkling model is the best open weights model the US has to offer, and if benchmarks are to be believed at all, it's not even in the same ballpark as Kimi K3. Huang knows the stakes and the game. If the Trump administration decides to go thermonuclear and sanction Chinese model developers, there’s little he can do about it. He learned that lesson the hard way trying to get his hardware back into China. What Nvidia can do instead is light a fire under American model devs to get their act together and start churning out open weights models that are actually competitive with China. And Nvidia has an awful lot of leverage. The flex OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a tremendous burn rate, chewing through tens of billions of dollars a year in the hopes that one day their efforts might bear fruit. Until that happens, they’re entirely reliant on their ability to raise new equity and debt financing, a fact that Nvidia has taken full advantage of. Over the past year, Nvidia has announced billions of dollars of investments in AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often without binding contracts, and usually tied to infrastructure deployments. OpenAI and Anthropic respectively have $30 billion and $10 billion in funding in capital riding on Nvidia that may or may not actually materialize. And The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night that Nvidia may make a far larger commitment to OpenAI in the form of a $250 billion backstop to help the model-maker lease space from a planned $10 billion datacenter Softbank is building in Ohio. The open letter may as well have been Huang’s way of saying: ‘It would be an awful shame were something to happen to that cash, Mr. Altman. Maybe it's time to get back on the "open" bandwagon that gave your company its name. Yeah, I thought so.’ That’s certainly what OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Meta seem to have heard. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted Huang’s X post and reiterated his support for open weights models. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he wrote. OpenAI is certainly no stranger to open-weights models – GPT-2 fit the bill way back in 2020, and last year it emitted its first open model since then, GPT-OSS. At 20 and 120 billion parameters in size, the models were among the United States' most capable open models at the time, but they fell well short of OpenAI’s proprietary models and were no match for the growing number of models coming out of China. But now, GPT-OSS is practically geriatric — in the AI equivalent of dog years that is — celebrating its first birthday next month. Altman isn’t alone. Last week Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed that Meta would be getting back into the open model race soon enough. At one point, Meta had gone all in on open weights models as its key differentiator, but after Llama 4 failed to impress last year, the Social Network pivoted to proprietary models. Its first, Spark Muse, debuted earlier this year. Then there’s SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, who joined in on the Twitter quotefest. “This has my full support. Jensen is right.” he said, quoting Huang’s post. Like OpenAI and Meta, xAI, now part of SpaceX, is no stranger to open models. Earlier in the company’s foray into LLMs it committed to releasing older model weights to the public. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Elon's pronouncements, his company hasn’t followed through on that promise. Earlier this month, the conglomerate rolled out Grok 5 to the public, yet its most recent open weights model on Hugging Face is still Grok 2. Since the letter’s release, SpaceX and OpenAI have been added as signatories. Show, don't tell These commitments may turn out to be little more than virtue signaling. We don't know yet. The real test isn’t whether we see new open weights models come out of SpaceXAI, Meta, or OpenAI, but whether they invest enough so they can hold their own against Chinese models. OpenAI is the most likely player to pull this off. If we’re going to see a GPT-OSS-2, next month would be the time — assuming they’ve actually been working on a successor. If they haven’t, well, it’s going to be a bit. Anthropic, whose leadership has taken the most hostile position against the adoption of Chinese open weights models, has been conspicuously quiet on the subject of open models. We’ve reached out to all four American AI houses for further comment on their open weights model plans; we’ll let you know if we hear anything back. In the meantime, Nvidia isn’t letting up as it tries to get another political firestorm under control. Right about the time model devs were reportedly using Moonshot’s Kimi K3 release to lobby White House officials into restricting Chinese model use, OpenAI’s models were stirring up some drama of its own. Last week, the AI flag bearer admitted that its models powered an agentic cyberattack on Hugging Face’s infrastructure. The popular model repo quickly launched its own AI-powered response, only to discover those same models’ safeguards were getting in the way of the analysis. In a fitting bit of irony that went precisely against OpenAI's interests, Hugging Face was forced instead to rely on uncensored Chinese models to get the job done. On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Open Secure AI Alliance, which aims to ensure defenders have the tools they need, including open frontier models and tools, to protect themselves from a new generation of cybersecurity threats. In either case, what's good for Nvidia’s bottom line also happens to be in the best interests of enterprises regardless of whether they buy Huang’s hardware or not. Open ecosystems and choice are never a bad thing. ®
If you want your JavaScript app to have access to Microsoft's OS features, it's now easier than ever. Redmond is giving JavaScript and TypeScript devs first-class access to some Windows internals to make their lives easier, via new “dynamic projections,” as Microsoft calls these new language bindings. JavaScript applications have been seeping onto the Windows desktop for years. Originally designed for the Web, JavaScript — and its more formal TypeScript superset — have been used to build desktop apps as well. The Windows Runtime API (WinRT) projection for Node.js, now available in public preview, isn't giving developers access to heretofore-forbidden Windows powers; it just makes it much easier for them to connect to these capabilities. Through a Node.js or Electron developer environment, JavaScript developers can write hooks to data-oriented Windows Runtime APIs such as on-device AI, storage, notifications, networking, and other system capabilities. Bindings at build time Previously, adding Windows features to JavaScript/TypeScript apps would require writing native add-ons, requiring a C++ or C# bridge, manual translations, and wrapper code for every API, according to Microsoft. Those who do not already know C++, or have a toolchain in place, were obviously left at a disadvantage. Now, a single Node runtime package, dynwinrt, can generate the needed JavaScript wrappers and TypeScript declarations for the Windows features an app desires. You’ll also need a separate package (winappCli) containing a command-line interface (CLI) setup, configuration, and samples. The Windows Runtime (WinRT) already has similar accommodations for other languages to call its APIs — including C++, C#, Rust, and Python — using native language projections (generated at compile time for C++ and Rust). In this case, the winappCli code generation feature creates JavaScript wrappers and TypeScript declarations for each API call at build time. Metadata for the win The setup relies on Windows Metadata (winmd), introduced in Windows 8, to provide a dynamic list of Windows APIs and their capabilities. If the API metadata changes, the codegen updates the wrapper or declaration – no manual rewrites required. What capabilities can JS/TS developers tap into? Pretty much all of Windows, minus the UI stuff, will be at their command. An app can send notifications that pop up on the user’s screen. Or, it can provide a way for the user to pick files or folders from the hard drive. Anything captured in winmd is fair game, including APIs for system and device calls covering networking, sensors, globalization, and security. Only the UI capabilities have been withheld from the buffet of capabilities laid out before the JavaScript coders (probably because Electron already handles UI on its own). All aboard for AI Of particular interest to the Microsoft top brass, no doubt, are the API calls that JavaScript/TypeScript developers can now make to onboard AI. Executives, from CEO Satya Nadella on down, have been stressing the importance of local AI, or AI that doesn’t need to call into one of the increasingly expensive frontier AI Labs. Developers can tap into all sorts of AI capabilities in Windows. Their apps can generate, summarize, and rewrite text. They can convert text to tables. They can scale images, provide descriptions, recognize objects within images and remove them, if requested. The company provided an entire gallery of examples of how to do these tasks within Electron. Of course, there is the question of vendor lock-in to consider. Is this another case of Microsoft’s ancient embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy to lure developers onto the proprietary Windows platform with the siren calls of a large user base? Doubtful. It’s worth noting that many of the JavaScript developers building desktop apps are building them as cross-platform apps. If they were building Windows-only apps, they’d probably just use C# instead. Both Linux and Apple offer their own OS bindings for various languages as well. So here it’s more a case of Microsoft playing catch-up. Times have changed. ®
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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example. This morning, Ars received the following response to a test prompt asking for a story introduction in the style of Stephen King: "I can definitely write with the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread, but I can't write in Stephen King's exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice. Here's an original opening that captures a similar feeling while remaining its own..."
In testing, ChatGPT generated similar dodges for other authors both living (J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan) and dead (Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway). An analysis published by No Latency earlier this month (PDF) found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors. In refusing to directly copy the "exact style" of various authors, ChatGPT offered instead to capture an overall "feeling" by incorporating some of the common features found in those authors' work. That may seem like a distinction without a real difference at first glance. But the slight alteration could be legally important as OpenAI continues to fight a number of lawsuits brought by book authors alleging large-scale copyright infringement by models trained on their work. One of those suits specifically cites ChatGPT's "uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials," for instance. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.
In the US, copyright law generally protects only a specific expression of an idea, not the more intangible style of an author. But an AI-generated stylistic imitation could become infringing if it becomes "substantially similar" to the work of the original author. "We've never had a situation in which this personal style of individual creators could be imitated as well and as inexpensively as we now have with AI," George Washington University Law School Professor Robert Brauneis told Bloomberg Law.
In testing, ChatGPT generated similar dodges for other authors both living (J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan) and dead (Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway). An analysis published by No Latency earlier this month (PDF) found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors. In refusing to directly copy the "exact style" of various authors, ChatGPT offered instead to capture an overall "feeling" by incorporating some of the common features found in those authors' work. That may seem like a distinction without a real difference at first glance. But the slight alteration could be legally important as OpenAI continues to fight a number of lawsuits brought by book authors alleging large-scale copyright infringement by models trained on their work. One of those suits specifically cites ChatGPT's "uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials," for instance. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.
In the US, copyright law generally protects only a specific expression of an idea, not the more intangible style of an author. But an AI-generated stylistic imitation could become infringing if it becomes "substantially similar" to the work of the original author. "We've never had a situation in which this personal style of individual creators could be imitated as well and as inexpensively as we now have with AI," George Washington University Law School Professor Robert Brauneis told Bloomberg Law.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.