How Open Models Are Driving AI Research
NVIDIA JJ Kim
Open AI models from NVIDIA and partners have become central to research presented at ICML 2026, with approximately 2,000 accepted papers citing NVIDIA GPUs and hundreds more building on specific open model families like Nemotron and Cosmos. Key applications include robot world models like DreamDojo for physical AI reasoning, protein prediction models like FLIP2 and KERMT for drug discovery, and synthetic data generation tools enabling large-scale training without human labeling. Companies including Merck, Sakana AI, and robotics manufacturers are deploying these open foundations to accelerate development in autonomous vehicles, biomedical research, and humanoid robotics.
Why it matters
Every year, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) reveals where thousands of AI researchers have decided to put their work. This year’s accepted papers reveal a clear direction: open frontier models and open AI infrastructure have become foundational to how modern AI science gets done. NVIDIA had 74 papers accepted at ICML 2026. Approximately […]
