■ In this week's AI Lab:Nvidia plans to spend billions building open AI models. Also, an agentic lab assistant, a benchmark for visual reasoning, and measuring the misbehavior of agentic AI.
Nvidia will spend $26 billion over the next five years to build open source artificial intelligence models, according to a 2025 financial filing. Executives confirmed the news, which has not been previously reported, in interviews with WIRED.
The sizable investment could see Nvidia evolve from a chipmaker with an impressive software stack into a bona fide frontier lab capable of competing with OpenAI and DeepSeek. It’s a strategic move that could further entrench Nvidia’s place as the AI world’s leading chip manufacturer, since the models are tuned to the company’s hardware.
Subscribe today to continue receiving my full newsletter each week. I've been writing about AI and related themes for over a decade (since neural networks were considered a dead end, in fact). I'm fascinated by how innovation occurs and how it affects the economy. And I want to understand the global picture, rather than just the world as viewed through the lens of Silicon Valley.
So, if you're keen to keep track of advances from the world of computing—AI, robotics, quantum, chipmaking, and more—that have the potential to transform the way we live ... this is the newsletter you for you.
