Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0
But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC
Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese models. But nowadays models like tera/luna could fill this area of the pareto front, and LANL already runs openai models on their clusters [2]. Maybe it's in custom SFT/RL, for instrument control or sensitive topics? But you'll still have to compete with frontier models + a harness.
I would have also liked to see a carrot tied to their offer. It'll be hard to get teams to contribute RL gyms or curated text. But throw in a "we'll fund a postdoc/student to do that" and I think you'd have teams scrambling to apply.
[1] https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-l...
[2] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-nation...
Here's an example[1] of the difference between what a U.S. Department of Energy employee adds to a ticket versus a private industry AI completing instructions as assigned.
This isn't some cherry-picked example, it's just what I happen to be dealing with right at this moment, happened just a couple of moments ago.
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengtheni...
An open weight tool call auto-reviewer, has all sorts of achievable scaling curve milestones.
Looks like on <https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27
On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia
At this point, Nemotron 3 is really an 8 month old model series. That's when Nemotron 3 Nano was released, and the Nemotron 3 Super/Ultra models this year are obviously based on that recipe, mostly just bigger with a few tweaks here and there. Against today's models, no, not that interesting. Each of the Nemotron 3 models were briefly competitive when they launched, but never exceptional, and less competitive with each scale up. The fact that it took so long for Nemotron 3 Ultra to launch really hampered its competitiveness.
The Nemotron 3 series is extremely open about training recipes and training data, far more open than most open weight models, and that is valuable.
Before Nemotron 3, Nvidia had never released a single LLM that I would consider interesting at all, so Nemotron 3 was a big step up. The closest thing was Mistral NeMo, but a significant part of the credit there goes to the Mistral team, not Nvidia.
Given how much Nemotron 3 improved, I'm curious to see if Nemotron 4 will take them to a leading edge level instead of just briefly competitive.
(Nvidia released a Nemotron 3 and a Nemotron 4 like 3 years ago... this year's Nemotron 3 is entirely unrelated. Nvidia's naming schemes leave a little bit to be desired.)
The American business model is exceedingly efficient at building large businesses from zero. I wouldn't dismiss it as just a jobs creation thing.
What do you mean by "basically"?
Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each?
LLMs need massive amounts of compute to compete, so I wouldn't claim that the great (and leading, and likely to continue to lead) LLMs are commodities end-to-end, even if the non-executing-at-scale LLMs files and IP are commoditized. The execute, the compute, that is what breathes life into the model, which is otherwise weak or dead.
If you watch it think, which you can, unlike American closed models, you can steer it. You can provide a a massive rocket ship stratospheric boost to help it orient itself. You have no self correction, there is no multiplayer in American proprietary models.
Sure it's great having super powerful mystic oracles that have the "right" answers. But I love respect & revere the open thinking. No it's not automous. But it is brilliant. And it considers. A lot. Deeply. It chases. That to me is the most human of models, even as it falls far astray.
You should help it. You can. Unlike these vicious dark surfaces which yield and tell you nothing. I think this is the actual meta-core-super-point of "The session you cannot take with you" (link below). It's the session that does not care about you, will not interact with you, will not peer with you, that is a dead remote far off oracle to you. Fuck these "oracles". They are a plague against the human spirit. We should alloy humanity and AI to Augment Intellect (Engelbart). (To do less is species treason.) https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118781
Arcee Al is the first industry partner supporting the new Genesis Mission open-weights program. A DOE-hosted contribution portal opens today, with first-round applications due August 14, 2026.


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with industry partners, has announced a new class of open-weight foundation models designed specifically to accelerate scientific discovery as part of DOE’s broader Genesis Mission initiative. These Genesis models aim to provide researchers, national laboratories, industry partners, and the broader open science community with powerful, transparent, and extensible AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of scientific domains and use cases. The first model in this class will be Genesis-Science-1, developed in partnership with Arcee.
By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science: enabling new workflows in materials discovery, energy systems, earth systems modeling, fusion, biology, high-energy physics, and beyond. This effort is grounded in the principles of open science, reproducibility, and responsible AI, with the goal of lowering barriers to advanced AI capabilities for the public good.
As part of this initiative, we are collecting information from interested participants who would like to contribute to and benefit from this new ecosystem:
DOE opened the Genesis open-weight models contribution portal today, hosted by the Genesis Mission US Open Models Initiative at https://genesisopenmodels.anl.gov/. If you or your organization are interested in participating, either by contributing models and data, co-developing evaluations and benchmarks, or collaborating on fine-tuning and application deployments, please share your information through our interest form below. Your engagement will help shape the capabilities, governance, and impact of Genesis-Science-1 and other Genesis open models as a shared public asset for scientific innovation. The portal invites universities, national laboratories, companies, scientific nonprofits, and research organizations to contribute data, research environments, evaluations, and technical expertise. Applications for the first contribution window close August 14, 2026.
The program is seeking scientific and technical materials for several stages of model development.
Foundation-stage contributions may include scientific text, code, documentation, and structured technical collections suitable for pretraining, midtraining, or context extension.
Post-training contributions may include expert demonstrations, annotated task examples, research software, datasets, complete workflow environments, reinforcement-learning tasks, held-out evaluations, scoring rubrics, tests, and verifiers.
The program also needs scientists and engineers who can review tasks, model behavior, and completed artifacts. Infrastructure providers may submit rolling inquiries about additional training or evaluation capacity.
The 2026 program has two scheduled contribution tracks. Organizations may apply to both when the proposed contributions are distinct.
| Contribution track | Appropriate contributions | Apply by | Delivery deadline if selected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation-stage data | Scientific text, code, documentation, and structured collections for pretraining, midtraining, and context extension | August 14, 2026 | |
| Additional deadlines expected every 3 months | August 28, 2026 | ||
| Post-training data and environments | Supervised fine-tuning examples, workflow environments, reinforcement-learning tasks, held-out evaluations, rubrics, tests, and verifiers | August 25, 2026 | |
| Additional deadlines expected every 3 months | September 14, 2026 |
Applicants will identify the relevant track, describe the scientific work and its importance, explain what material is ready, name the experts available to support it, and state the proposed terms of use.
The public application form collects descriptions and metadata only. No scientific material is transferred during the application process, and each contributor specifies how its material may be handled.
Applications will be reviewed, with a DOE governed process with input from academic, national laboratory and industry partners, through five gates: scientific fit, rights and handling, expert and evaluation readiness, technical integration, and final program selection.
Selected contributors will work with the researchers building and evaluating Genesis Open Models. They will receive early evaluation access as the system develops and will be credited in the technical report and release materials.
The program is particularly interested in workflows that are poorly represented by standard Al evaluations and require direct collaboration with the researchers who perform the work.
Parties interested in contributing open weight models may directly email [email protected].
Launched by executive order in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a Department of Energy-led national initiative to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence. Its stated goal is to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.
The mission connects DOE’s 17 national laboratories, leadership-class computing facilities, scientific data resources, and partners across industry and academia. DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil directs the Genesis Mission. More information is available at energy.gov/genesis-mission.
Genesis mission is accepting new partners for the open models effort.
Existing Partners: