The Power of Open Source: Building Giants in the Open

Описание: Explore how open-source AI powers production today: candid lessons from European founders (n8n, Black Forest Labs), a pragmatic tour of the open infra stack (Snowflake, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Supabase/Postgres), and investor playbooks for OSS licensing and sustainable monetization—plus 2026 bets on agentic apps, fine-tuning, unified data platforms, world models, and robotics demos.

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⏰ Timestamps
0:00 – Welcome & Event Setup
Opening remarks, why Hugging Face hosted this side event at Slush, and overview of the agenda (3 panels + demos).

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Panel 1 – Open-Source AI Founders (n8n & Black Forest Labs)
3:10 – Founder intros & origin stories
Backgrounds of Jan (n8n) and Robin (BFL), their transition from creative/academic work to founding open-source AI companies.
6:20 – Building global OSS companies from Europe
YC experiences, German GmbH setups, and lessons learned growing OSS brands globally.
10:40 – Licensing, business models & the OSS tension
Fair-code decisions, monetization transparency, and handling license shifts with community trust.
15:00 – Product philosophy & internal dogfooding
How both teams use community contributions internally and balance openness with product direction.
17:36 – What’s next for AI tools & assistants
Future vision on agents, automation systems, and world-model-inspired workflows.
18:53 – Panel 1 wrap-up

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Panel 2 – Open Infra & Developer Ecosystem (Snowflake, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Supabase)
19:23 – Intro: The rising developer stack for AI apps
Why 2025–2026 are the “agentic application” years and how infra is adapting.
21:51 – Snowflake: Open formats & lakehouse future
Iceberg, Polaris metadata catalog, ingestion tooling, and how Snowflake integrates HF models through Cortex/containers.
25:29 – OpenAI: OSS models & developer tools
GPT-OSS + GPT-5 coexistence, Safeguard policies, and OpenAI’s focus on startups building on top of ChatGPT.
28:52 – NVIDIA: Full-stack open tooling & robotics
Nemotron recipes, Cosmos world models, Groot for robotics, and NVIDIA’s view of open synthetic-data pipelines.
31:59 – Supabase: Postgres as the AI backbone
How developers use Postgres for agents, AI app generation patterns, and Supabase’s MCP integrations.
41:17 – Market shift: From POCs to production AI apps
Evaluations, agentic workloads, enterprise dataset integration, and distribution via ChatGPT/Apps.
45:05 – 2026 predictions for data + AI infra
Unifying analytical & transactional workloads, Postgres everywhere, and more open-source model ecosystems.
45:30 – Panel 2 wrap-up

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Panel 3 – OSS Investors (General Catalyst & Accel)
45:54 – Venture perspective on open-source AI
Introductions, backgrounds, and why VCs see OSS infra as a long-term bet.
49:01 – What “open source” really means in 2025
OSI definitions vs pragmatic definitions, and avoiding “bait-and-switch” licensing.
51:04 – Hybrid models & regulated markets
What should remain OSS, what should be proprietary, and why enterprise features often aren’t open.
54:42 – Measuring traction in OSS startups
Real usage vs. vanity metrics, contributors, connectors, and examples (Kafka, Nix, Temporal, etc.).
57:17 – The optimistic future of OSS AI
Why OSS keeps proprietary labs honest, ensures accessibility, and accelerates innovation.
58:25 – Final thoughts

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Closing & Demos
1:00:53 – Community thanks & event close
Shout-out to attendees, instructions for demo area, robotics corner, and networking.