I have noticed in just the past two weeks or so, a lot of the naysayers have changed their tunes. I expect over the next 2 months there will be another sea change as the network effect and new frameworks kick in.
I'd say that it's probably not a play against open source, but more trying to remove/change the bottlenecks in the current chip production cycle. Nvidia likely doesn't care who wins, they just want to sell their chips. They literally can't make enough to meet current demand. If they split off the inference business (and now own one of the only purchasable alternatives) they can spin up more production.
That said, it's completely anti-competitive. Nvidia could design a inference chip themselves, but instead the are locking down one of the only real independents. But... Nobody was saying Groq was making any real money. This might just be a rescue mission.
By 2025 the majority of applications will use AI in some way (mostly to allow for sloppy user input), in 5 years there will be no non-AI applications.
For example, in healthcare (because... day job), you will be interacting with an AI as the first step for your visits/appointments, AI will work with you to fill out your forms/history, your chart will be created by AI, your x-ray and lab results will be read by AI first, and your discharge instructions will be created on the fly with AI... etc. etc. etc. This tech is deploying today. Not in a year, today. The only thing that's holding it up is cost and staff training.
WFH, flood of Dev hiring, increasingly hostile worker relations, a bunch of web 2.0 folks finally retiring, VC money drying up...
take your pick.
Software is just crappy these days.