You have an AI product to build.
Led by Nvidia ‘s Nader Khalil, Director of Developer Tech, and Sydney Sykes, Global Head of VC Partnerships, the session will discuss the trade-offs between open and proprietary AI and whether either approach can provide a lasting competitive advantage.
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Nvidia said in July that 145 papers accepted at ICML 2026 cited its Nemotron open models and datasets, alongside research using other Nvidia open model families across robotics, autonomous vehicles, and biomedical research.
The result is a market where the question is less about whether open models can be useful and more about where each approach makes commercial sense.
Even Nvidia rejects an either-or framing. At GTC earlier this year, CEO Jensen Huang argued that the future is not proprietary versus open, but proprietary and open.
Nader Khalil approaches the discussion from the builder and infrastructure perspective. Before becoming Nvidia’s Director of Developer Tech, where he leads open source and local AI, he co-founded Brev.dev, an AI infrastructure company acquired by Nvidia in July 2024.
Sydney Sykes, meanwhile, brings the venture ecosystem into the discussion as Nvidia’s Global Head of VC Partnerships.
Its Nemotron 3 Super, launched in March, is an open 120-billion-parameter model designed for agentic workloads, and companies are already combining it with proprietary models rather than treating the two approaches as mutually exclusive.