> Nvidia has been using its newfound liquid funds to train its own family of models

Nvidia has always had its own family of models, it's nothing new and not something you should read too much into IMHO. They use those as template other people can leverage and they are of course optimized for Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia has been training models in the Megatron family as well as many others since at least 2019 which was used as blueprint by many players. [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08053