NVIDIA’s Nader Khalil and Sydney Sykes join Disrupt 2026

You have an AI product to build. Do you choose a proprietary frontier model and get moving quickly? Build on an open model and gain greater control? Fine-tune your own version? Run locally? Use multiple models? Change strategy six months from now when the economics and capabilities shift again? There may not be one right answer. But for founders, choosing badly can affect almost everything that follows — cost, infrastructure, margins, differentiation, speed, and control. Open models have advanced quickly. 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. At the same time, proprietary frontier labs continue pushing model capabilities forward. The result is a market where the question is increasingly less about whether open modelscanbe useful and more about where each approach makes commercial sense. Even Nvidia rejects a simple either-or framing. At GTC earlier this year, CEO Jensen Huang argued that the future is not proprietary versus open, but proprietaryandopen. That sounds straightforward until you have to build a company around the decision. Nader Khalilapproaches 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. Brev.dev was built around simplifying access to GPU infrastructure across different environments. Nvidia’s developer documentation described its tools as allowing developers to deploy AI software across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure without locking themselves into a single compute source. Sydney Sykes, meanwhile, brings the venture ecosystem into the discussion as Nvidia’s Global Head of VC Partnerships. Together, that creates room to examine the same decision from different directions: what developers need to build and what companies need to become investable, scalable businesses. Sit front and center at one of the biggest debates in today’s world of AI.Register for your ticket before the savings of up to $200 endon September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. There is another uncomfortable question behind the open-versus-closed debate: Where does your competitive advantage actually live? If competitors can access the same proprietary API, differentiation needs to come from somewhere else — proprietary data, workflow, distribution, customer relationships, product experience, or specialized technology. But choosing an open model doesn’t automatically give you a moat either. You gain flexibility and potentially greater control, but you also take on decisions around deployment, optimization, and infrastructure. And the economics can change depending on the workload and scale. Nvidia is investing heavily in that open ecosystem. 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. That hybrid reality may ultimately be the most interesting part of the debate. That’s what makes this session useful beyond an audience of AI engineers. If you’re afounder, the choice can shape your margins, fundraising story, and product roadmap. If you’re aninvestor, understanding where value sits in the stack can help distinguish genuine defensibility from a thin product layer sitting on somebody else’s model. If you’re a line-of-business lead, it affects procurement, security, data control, infrastructure, and the freedom to change providers later. And for developers and students, it’s a chance to understand where the technical decisions being made today connect directly with the business models being built around them. No one needs another abstract argument over whether open or proprietary AI is philosophically better. What builders need is a clearer understanding of the trade-offs.