I believe the average person is going to be worse off without Jensen sending chips to China because that will be the end of frontier level open weight models. Jensen was making a huge push towards developing their own open weight models too, NVIDIA in general was aligned to that mission.

Our options after this are going to be spyware, censored models from a duopoly. We are fucked into a surveillance state without open weight. So this isn’t taking what they can get, this is people cheering on their own demise because they’re so hungry to take down any elite.

Okay, first off, the average person is not going to run local models. They will use whatever is best or cheapest, like they always do, privacy be damned, and small open weight providers are likely to be even worse on that count than the big ones (what do they have to lose?) If they do run local models, the company most likely to deliver these chips is Apple, not Nvidia.

Second, there's no reason the new CEO wouldn't keep pushing towards open weights if that's good for the company, and I believe it is. It's a form of hedging against the big labs and creating a sustainable demand outside of them.

Third, if China wants Nvidia GPUs, don't worry, they'll get them. While they need them. They're certainly working very hard to reproduce the entire vertical on their turf and I'm fairly confident they'll get close enough within a few years. They're not hinging their whole strategy on Jensen, they're not idiots.

Nothing's going to really change. It's fine. Well, as fine as everything usually is.