It's not their first rodeo. Their cards already need to authenticate with the driver to enable the card completely. When I last checked, Nouveau driver has received a key which only enabled the hardware, allowing enough features to see a desktop and install closed NVIDIA drivers, nothing more.

Remember, the kernel module is open source, but rest of the driver is closed source, and any kernel level code which can't be open sourced but had to be is moved to card firmware. Only the kernel module is open source. Not the libraries, not the driver, nothing else.

NVIDIA is holding to its pearls like a sloth holding to its branch, because their all business model and livelihood is dependent on that control. I still commend AMD's decision to allow full card enablement with any driver which talks the correct language.

This is exactly it, they have stated that they are planning to introduce licensing and subscriptions for server farms: https://www.pcguide.com/news/nvidia-reportedly-planning-annu...

There is already DRM for AI. check out nvidia’s docs around hosting proprietary models with encrypted weights

I don't see the case for DRM protected local models on either side.

The consumer has access to free and open models for local use.

The supplier has better control and wider market to serve running the models in data centers.

Only way I can see encrypted models being widespread is if they are bundled as part of a software package (OS/Browser/etc) and not sold as the product.

It wouldn't work on windows either, if that were the case. It sounds more like it hasn't been properly implemented yet

Is DRM going to work considering how good LLMs are in reverse engineering? I would say it is a fools errand at this point.

Or buy Huawei ascend...