I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
i suppose this is part of why openai and anthropic have not been shy about advertising the scarier strains of their models, these past few months; they basically have to force the white house's hand or risk being commoditized among the various other options in a microsoft/openrouter dropdown.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.
Nvidia is now lobbying to remove the export ban, to try to reduce the incentives for developing their own high-end LLM training/serving (and cash in on current demand).
And unfortunately, we are losing credibility on all fronts in the last year and a half. I wonder why?
Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
"AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc.
Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
I do lean toward them being significantly overvalued at present. OpenAI & Anthropic's valuations assume high margin product pricing on raw intelligence itself. Even if assume the labs will start charging value-based pricing, enterprise buyers will pay that pricing to whoever saves them engineering hours to make any cheap model work inside their compliance boundary, no guarantee that's going to be OpenAI or Anthropic.
Microsoft wins either way, proprietary, expensive models or cheap commoditized inference, because they monetize the workflow on top, not the raw intelligence. I also happen to think it's everything "on top" where a lot of value lives. Plenty of non-tech enterprises and companies out there itching for a ClickOps style AI product, especially if they don't have an engineering team, that they can buy off the shelf, meets all the compliance checkboxes, and does what they need without having to build the agents and harnesses themselves with the APIs.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/azure-capacity-crunch-exten...
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
Nvidia sells the hardware.
Microsoft sells the hosting.