The inevitable need for an open model consortium
From Interconnects by Nathan Lambert
April 11, 2026 · 6 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the future of open model consortia in AI and the challenges faced by companies in funding and developing these models.
Recently, I was talking with Percy Liang , Stanford professor and lead of the Marin project (another fully-open model lab), and it set in on me that there will eventually be a consortium of companies funding a foundational set of open models used across industry. It’s not clear when this’ll emerge, and Nemotron ( Coalition ) is Nvidia’s attempt to bankroll and bootstrap this approach within a single wealthy company, but a consortium is the only long-term stable path to well-funded, near-frontier open models. In recent months, we’ve seen a lot of turnover in open model labs, with high-profile departures at Qwen and Ai2 ( my comment ). This shouldn’t be super surprising to followers of the ecosystem — it’s happened before with Meta shifting its focus away from Llama , and it’ll only happen more as the cost of trying to keep pace at the frontier of AI only increases. The other leading labs with models available today include Chinese startups such as Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Z.ai — all of which look precarious on their ability to fund continued growth in the cost of training or R&D. Releasing one’s strongest models openly today is in active tension with the option of spending…
People in this episode
Host: Nathan Lambert
Guest: Percy Liang
Topics covered
- open models
- AI consortium
- industry funding
- model development
- business models
- AI research
Keywords
- open models
- AI consortium
- Nvidia
- Percy Liang
- funding
- model development
- business models
- AI research
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Stanford, Nemotron, Nvidia, Qwen, Ai2, Meta, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Z.ai
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