Letter Enthusiasts, Open Source vs. Closed Source, Mega-Startup School | Luke Knight & Ronan Chambers, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jonathan Jacobi, Dean Meyer, Brent Franson, Matej Cernosek, Justin Boitano

**John Coogan** (0:00)
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**Jordi Hays** (0:02)
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Massive, massive weekend, crazy debate. You called this out to me a week ago. You said, we've never been in a moment in tech where people have been more aggressive at each other, that there's been more maybe tech infighting. I don't know exactly what word you used, but you described this idea.

**Tyler** (0:38)
Tensions are high.

**Jordi Hays** (0:39)
Tensions, rivalries. I think it's just like, it's a non-stable equilibrium.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:44)
Well, yeah, when you think about the biggest, like with people going at it in like 2021, it would be like Keith Rabois saying, there will never be another unicorn that started in San Francisco.

**Tyler** (0:56)
Or like working from home is not doable.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:58)
And then a bunch of people will be screenshotting.

**Jordi Hays** (1:00)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:00)
And then they'd be, and years later, they'd be like, see, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. a big company was built.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:07)
And then, and that was people being like, you're an idiot.

**Dean Meyer** (1:09)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:09)
Oh, you're an idiot.

**Dean Meyer** (1:10)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:11)
And now it's like, I hate you and I want to...

**Jordi Hays** (1:14)
It's not that direct, but it is high stakes because like the market structure has very much not solidified for a while. And it's different because when you go back to the iPhone and Steve Jobs being mad at Eric Schmidt about Android, that was a tense moment that happened, hey, behind closed scenes completely. It wasn't like Steve Jobs was taking shots at Android really beyond like little things in the keynotes here and there, tiny stuff. It wasn't every day on Twitter, Apple employees being like, Google's annoying for ripping us off or whatever.
And then the market did solidify. And it was like, OK, Android's like the ad-supported one and iPhone's still printing lots of profits. And things are understood.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:58)
Also, companies got big, or they got bigger quickly. But you didn't have companies where trillions of dollars of market cap was just born in the span of a few years.

**Jordi Hays** (2:09)
And then you had the Mag 7, where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around single-digit trillions. And so they can sort of be comfortable with each other.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:19)
And a lot of them kind of had their own thing, that they were focused on, and then they maybe do some other things. Whereas now everyone has a model.
Even, you know, Nvidia has open models. Microsoft, and they own a lot of open AI.

**Jordi Hays** (2:34)
Pretty much every one of the Mag 7 is an AI company, in the sense that they have a model. I mean, even Tesla has a self-driving model. There's a, you know, everyone has like a data center player, cloud play, something like it's, no one's sitting out the AI boom.
But the debate is raging, kicked off by Jensen from Nvidia, joining X. That's how you know it's serious, when he's getting in the arena, the real arena.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:03)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (3:04)
Founding a company and growing it to $5 trillion, that's just child's play compared to getting on X.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:09)
He's like, fine, I'll go to the dive bar.

**Jordi Hays** (3:11)
Yeah, yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:11)
I'll go to the internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.

**Jordi Hays** (3:14)
Yeah, no, he did. So Nvidia is leading a new coalition of tech companies that want the US government and its allies to see open source artificial intelligence as a cyber security asset, not a threat. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Dubbed the Open Secure AI Alliance, the Nvidia back group said Monday it aims to create and deploy a suite of open source AI tools that any company can use to defend against cyber attacks. The group includes SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir, dozens of other companies, many of which publicly oppose restricting access to open source AI.
It is the latest salvo in a battle over the future of open source and open weights, AI tools amid growing concern from government and industry officials about AI systems causing cyber attacks. Those fears have prompted the White House to increase oversight of AI models and push the private sector to deploy AI for defensive purposes. So the backdrop here is basically just like we went through a sort of hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over like what it will take to like approve new frontier models and Mythos came out and was private and then a couple months later I think the actual timeline is relevant here. So Mythos was April 7th, Fable came online June 9th and then got pulled June 12th before coming back July 1st. We're now one month later and we have an Open Source model that doesn't by definition have to go through any discussion or any discussion in DC. Whereas we've been hearing about, okay, Anthropic and Open AI are going to Washington DC, sharing the new model capabilities. Maybe the government's taking a look at the model card. Maybe there's potential for evals that the government would run and have an opinion on before it goes out. This is basically saying, hey, all of that is nonsense and not going to matter because we're just going to drop the weights and there's not going to be an approval process for that of any kind.