YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Nvidia in talks to acquire US 'open' model startup Reflection AI

50 points arkj 1 hour ago 29 comments

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

boy do I wish US capitalism could chill on the consolidation...

tjwebbnorfolk 1 hour ago | parent

I for one am excited by the prospect of a well-funded open-source competitor to Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Chinese models.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

That can happen without consolidation, the funding is already so circular it's dizzying

kadoban 57 minutes ago | parent

I don't love that it's Nvidia. They're already in some weird incestuous thing with two of those three and the rest of the market.

afavour 52 minutes ago | parent

Eh, given the level of trading between NVidia and the established AI companies will it be a true competitor?

jacquesm 33 minutes ago | parent

I would be too. Where are we going to buy the GPUs though?

embedding-shape 58 minutes ago | parent

Back in the day, things like these were outlawed and the government tried to ensure competition in the markets:

> The major film studios owned the theaters where their motion pictures were shown, either in partnerships or outright. Thus, specific theater chains showed only the films produced by the studio that owned them. The studios created the films, had the writers, directors, producers and actors on staff (under contract), owned the film processing and laboratories, created the prints and distributed them through the theaters that they owned: In other words, the studios were vertically integrated, creating a de facto oligopoly. [...] Ultimately, this issue of the studios' then-alleged (and later upheld) illegal trade practices led to all the major movie studios being sued in 1938 by the U.S. Department of Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Nowadays it seems like "vertically integrated" is something most companies openly aim for.

binary132 53 minutes ago | parent

Citizen Kane type stuff

hiworld6543 38 minutes ago | parent

As usual, Wikipedia has it backward. There were very few theaters in existence able to show films produced by the studios. They invested in theaters and found local businessmen to operate them, both as sole proprietors and as partners.

The investment was out of necessity, not interest in monopolies.

Writers and directors craved an audience, so they appealed to studios for funding. That’s opportunity meeting, not monopolistic practices.

seydor 50 minutes ago | parent

what are they going to do with all the free money people are investing on them?

ed_balls 41 minutes ago | parent

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 could be considered the worst regulation of 21 century. It helped created behemoth corporations, where a single person can misallocate hundred of billon of dollars (Oh, hi Mark), they can buy out any competition.

Right now US economy is basically a centrally planned economy.

bpodgursky 29 minutes ago | parent

Reflection AI was founded in 2024. Is it really consolidation when new companies spawn out of nothing and get acquired 2 years later? That's just normal M&A churn.

anonymous908213 19 minutes ago | parent

If all successful new tech companies are absorbed into existing dominant tech companies, that would in fact be consolidation.

charcircuit 22 minutes ago | parent

Would you prefer these companies going bankrupt and stop existing?

lovich 13 minutes ago | parent

Competitive markets have creative destruction

maz1b 56 minutes ago | parent

Didn't they just recently invest in them? Curious about their strategy, considering NVIDIA already does Nemotron and i think diffusion models as well.

johnnyApplePRNG 50 minutes ago | parent

Their strategy is to prevent open models from proliferating, so their massive investments in these AI frauds are not completely unwound.

That's my take, at least.

Nemotron is TERRIBLE, and purposefully so. It must be.

They cannot be THAT BAD at training AI models. I don't believe it.

ReptileMan 48 minutes ago | parent

The other way. Nvidia would love open source jevon paradoxed ai - that would run inference on their chips.

kimixa 45 minutes ago | parent

But their goal would be to ensure it only runs on their chips, and not any competitors. I can't see how they could do that if the best models truely were "Open".

I can see one of Nvidia's biggest fears is the inference hardware becoming commoditised.

redanddead 44 minutes ago | parent

can someone weigh in on this. what's the actual play here

are they actually suppressing the western open models?

china doesn't give a fuck either way

imo, they see the weakness emerging at the intersection of all the labs, everybody knew there was no moat, so they're gonna control its direction and basically tell the Jev guys what they want them to work on

mattmaroon 30 minutes ago | parent

It’s just an illogical conspiracy theory. Open weights models still have to run on someone’s chips. NVIDIA is model-agnostic.

They are just trying to grow the pie because they have nobody else competing for slices.

My guess is they want as many frontier models using their chips as possible. The only threat to their business is companies making their own chips which Google does and the others are working toward. The last thing they want is only 3 frontier labs who are all not buying NVIDIA.

jollyllama 17 minutes ago | parent

Watch what they do and not what they say.

frozenseven 23 minutes ago | parent

Insane conspiracy theory. There's no incentive whatsoever for Nvidia to release weak models. If you bothered to pay any attention, they are aggressively trying to catch up. Whether they succeed, that's of course a separate question.

alexdns 10 minutes ago | parent

why would Nvidia try to compete against their biggest customers - openai and anthropic ?

rapsin4 6 minutes ago | parent

So that nvidia gets bargaining power...? Nvidia needs to diversify its customer base

bobthepanda 6 minutes ago | parent

the power that giveth can also taketh away.

similar to how eventually AWS started making their own chips for data centers, and Apple did that for their hardware, it's not a ridiculous thing to plan for the AI companies to start making their own chips to optimize for their use cases and cut out the middleman for margins.

radium3d 11 minutes ago | parent

I believe NVIDIA's long term strategy will be to pivot from the data center to the public, and the public will utilize open models on NVIDIA hardware at home. This will come after the RAMpocalypse completes (when the new fabrication plants (China, Tesla/SpaceXAI/Intel) fully ramp up and start selling their RAM for cheap in the next few years). Data centers will be for training mostly.

mark_l_watson 4 minutes ago | parent

Have you used Nemotron-3.5-lightening? I don’t use it as much as Poolside’s (excellent!!) Laguna XS 2.1 6bit, but the new Nemotron model is good.

I think NVIDIA does want small open models running on-prem to explode as a market! Lots of smaller GPU installations for companies who wisely want on-prem inference.

Of course NVIDIA will also keep making a ton of money selling to hyper scalers, but not forever: Chinese chips are getting better, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. designing their own inference chips.

NVIDIA is handling this brilliantly.