By Nathan Lambert
Publication Date: 2026-02-04 18:00:00
One of the big stories of 2025 for me was how Nvidia massively stepped up their open model program — more releases, higher quality models, joining a small handful of companies releasing datasets, etc. In this interview, I sat down with one of the 3 VP’s leading the effort of 500+ technical staff, Bryan Catanzaro, to discuss:
Their very impressive Nemotron 3 Nano model released in Dec. 2025, and the bigger Super and Ultra variants coming soon,
Why Nvidia’s business clearly benefits from them building open models,
How the Nemotron team culture was crafted in pursuit of better models,
Megatron-LM and the current state of open-source training software,
Career reflections and paths into AI research,
And other topics.
The biggest takeaway I had from this interview is how Nvidia understands their unique roll as a company that and both build and directly capture the value they get from building open language models, giving them a uniquely sustainable advantage.
Bryan has a beautiful analogy for open models this early in AI’s development, and how they are a process of creating “potential energy” for AI’s future applications.
I hope you enjoy it!
Guest: Bryan Catanzaro, VP Applied Deep Learning Research (ADLR), NVIDIA. X: @ctnzr, LinkedIn, Google Scholar.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and where ever you get your podcasts. For other Interconnects interviews, go here.
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