AI Built in the Open: Systems, Scale, & the Future of Innovation

[Monty2026: The Infrastructure Race] Charles Zedlewski (Chief Product Officer, Together.ai ), Robert Brennan (Co-Founder & CEO, OpenHands), and Nader Khalil (Director, Developer Technology, Nvidia) discuss open-source AI with moderator Yvonne Wassenaar (Senior Advisor & Board Director). The panel argues that open AI systems, including accessible weights, open training methods, and community-driven inference stacks, are reaching performance parity with proprietary frontier models for most enterprise use cases at a fraction of the cost. Khalil frames Nvidia's role as enabling the full open-source stack. Brennan positions OpenHands as proof that production-grade agentic AI can be built entirely on open foundations, while Zedlewski notes that nearly every major coding agent already runs some meaningful share of inference on open-weight models.