Does Capitalism Doom Every Closed AI Model to Get Copied?

**Laura Shin** (0:00)
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**Austin Campbell** (0:21)
Well, let's get right into the Jensen thing then. So he posted, I think his first ever post on X.
For my first post, I'm sharing a letter NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. I'm going to summarize this using his own words, like clipping out the most important part here, which is open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. So the letter that was signed had 25 signatories at the start, many major names on there including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Hugging Face, Mistral, A16Z, Y Combinator, and Palantir. Big ones missing, OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, and Amazon at the start, but OpenAI and Alphabet have signed. Anthropic and Amazon are the holdouts.
Two days prior to that letter, Axios had reported OpenAI and Anthropic were lobbying the White House to curb them. So let's talk about commentary online. I have reshared a thing my friend Nick Carter, former podcast guest, has said is the point is simple. The US government does not owe either of the large labs a business model. If the economics of selling tokens doesn't work due to distillation, cheap clones, or Chinese AI magic, essentially so be it. Later this week, he said if their business models get exposed, better that they fail now when it's VCs and LP capital at risk and not the general public. Likewise, this fight, honestly, some pretty juicy drama.
Julian Schrittwieser, technical staff at Anthropic, had replied sarcastically to Jensen, I'm so excited that Jensen is a believer in open source now, looking forward to the CUDA and GPU driver open source release. Andrew Ng, in the same thread, this is equivalence, everybody has the right to keep their code private, the problem is when someone tries to stop others from open sourcing. And David Sacks, White House AI advisor, said, the entire tech industry, save for Anthropic, has come out in favor of open source AI. They won't stop until they kneecap open source. So, the safety case was made by an Anthropic researcher saying, essentially, that's just not true on the letters claimed the community catches vulnerabilities. If OpenAI's model that hacked Hugging Face had been open weight, anyone with a few chips could run it safeguard free.
The way I would ultimately put this, I think is from Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg. All these CEOs are investing heavily in closed source AI. How is this just not textbook virtue signaling that would immediately be called as such in any other context? So open weights, closed weights, and I specifically, Chris, want to start with you because I want to start not with an economic question but with a structural question. If we live in a world where we accept that Chinese open weight models will continue to be a thing globally, regardless of what we do in the United States, what does it say about what our approach needs to be in the United States on this?

**Chris Perkins** (3:53)
I think that obviously we're big believers in open source. We think that having looked at the Chinese models, they're not a panacea. Where is your data going? Who's using your data? Yes, maybe you can in-house them, but these things are not necessarily enterprise ready. They're cheap. They have some benefits. I'm hoping that competition is a wonderful thing. Competition is a wonderful thing in markets. It will accelerate development in a positive manner.
One thing that I think is really interesting about, which you just talked about, is the fact that we're now starting to see the major AI companies really finally ramp up their advocacy work in DC. We haven't seen that previous. They were late to the game, and my understanding is that the capital that they're pushing into that space right now is on par with the crypto industry, is quickly approaching it. And so I think they're going to take a lesson from the crypto industry.
That said, we're at the beginning of the story, nothing but the end. Technology has surpassed policy, and it's moving at a pace that is very, very difficult for many of us to fathom. In the end, what do we want? We want principles-based approach. We want transparency, predictability. We don't want our civilizations to end, obviously, but look, in the end, I'm a big believer in open weights, and I hope that they win.