December 15, 2025 News
Nvidia Acquires Slurm Developer SchedMD and Releases Nemotron 3 Open AI Model Family
Nvidia acquired SchedMD, the developer of the Slurm workload management system used in high-performance computing and AI, pledging to maintain it as open source and vendor-neutral. The company also released Nemotron 3, a new family of open AI models designed for building AI agents, including variants optimized for different task complexities. These moves reflect Nvidia's strategy to strengthen its open source AI offerings and position itself as a key infrastructure provider for physical AI applications like robotics and autonomous vehicles.
Skynet Chance (+0.01%): Expanding open source AI infrastructure and agent-building tools increases accessibility to advanced AI capabilities, slightly raising the surface area for potential misuse or uncontrolled deployment. However, the focus on efficiency and developer tools rather than autonomous decision-making or superintelligence limits direct risk impact.
Skynet Date (+0 days): Improved infrastructure and accessible open models for AI agents accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous systems, marginally speeding the timeline toward scenarios involving loss of control. The magnitude is small as these are incremental improvements to existing infrastructure rather than fundamental breakthroughs.
AGI Progress (+0.01%): The release of efficient open models for multi-agent systems and the acquisition of critical AI infrastructure represent meaningful progress in scaling and coordinating AI systems, which are necessary components for AGI. The focus on physical AI and autonomous agents addresses key capabilities gaps beyond pure language understanding.
AGI Date (+0 days): Strengthening open source infrastructure and releasing accessible models for complex multi-agent applications accelerates the pace of AI development by lowering barriers for researchers and developers. This consolidation of AI infrastructure under a major provider facilitates faster iteration and deployment cycles toward AGI capabilities.
Nvidia Considers Expanding H200 GPU Production Following Trump Administration Approval for China Sales
Nvidia received approval from the Trump administration to sell its powerful H200 GPUs to China, with a 25% sales cut requirement, reversing previous Biden-era restrictions. Chinese companies including Alibaba and ByteDance are rushing to place large orders, prompting Nvidia to consider ramping up H200 production capacity. Chinese officials are still evaluating whether to allow imports of these chips, which are significantly more powerful than the H20 GPUs previously available in China.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): Increased access to powerful AI training hardware in China could accelerate development of advanced AI systems in a jurisdiction with potentially different safety standards and alignment priorities, slightly increasing uncontrolled AI development risks. The expanded global distribution of frontier compute capabilities reduces centralized oversight possibilities.
Skynet Date (-1 days): Providing China access to H200 GPUs removes a compute bottleneck that was slowing AI development there, modestly accelerating the global pace toward powerful AI systems. The policy reversal enables faster training of large models in a major AI development hub.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): Expanded availability of H200 GPUs to Chinese AI companies removes significant hardware constraints on training large language models and other AI systems, enabling more rapid scaling and experimentation. This represents meaningful progress in global compute access for AGI-relevant research.
AGI Date (-1 days): Lifting compute restrictions for a major AI development region with companies like Alibaba and ByteDance accelerates the timeline by enabling previously constrained organizations to train frontier models. The approval removes a significant bottleneck that was artificially slowing AGI-relevant development in China.