In this episode with The New Stack Agents, Frederic Lardinois, NVIDIA’s Joey Conway says advances in AI over the past year have dramatically improved the capabilities of local models, making them practical for enterprise and personal use alongside frontier cloud models. Rather than replacing large models, Conway envisions a “system of models” where specialized local models handle routine, cost-sensitive, or privacy-focused tasks, while larger frontier models tackle more complex reasoning. He explains that organizations can fine-tune smaller open models using domain-specific data, creating expert AI agents that reflect the specialized roles found within businesses. 

NVIDIA supports this ecosystem through open models, training tools, and software such as NeMo, Dynamo, and Nemotron. Conway also highlights the growing importance of agentic harnesses, which give AI models access to tools, memory, and iterative workflows, significantly improving performance and reducing costs. Looking ahead, he expects AI orchestration to become increasingly important, with intelligent routing systems selecting the right model for each task based on complexity, cost, latency, and data governance requirements, enabling enterprises to balance performance, security, and efficiency.

Learn more from The New Stack around NVIDIA's latest updates in AI:

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