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:
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Their very impressive Nemotron 3 Nano model released in Dec. 2025, and the bigger Super and Ultra variants coming soon,
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Why Nvidia’s business clearly benefits from them building open models,
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How the Nemotron team culture was crafted in pursuit of better models,
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Megatron-LM and the current state of open-source training software,
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Career reflections and paths into AI research,
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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.
2019–2022 — Foundational Work
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Megatron-LM (model parallelism framework that has become very…