Open Source vs. Closed Source, NVIDIA Backs SSI, YC Startup School Fills Stadium | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Again, 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 like more, maybe tech infighting. I don't know exactly what word you used, but you described this idea.

**Tyler** (0:17)
Tensions are high.

**John Coogan** (0:18)
It's tensions, rivalries. I think it's just like, it's a non-stable equilibrium.

**Jordi Hays** (0:23)
Well, yeah, when you think about the biggest, like with people going at it in like 2021, it would be like Keith Rabois saying like, there will never be another unicorn started in San Francisco.

**John Coogan** (0:34)
Or like, or like working from home is not doable.

**Jordi Hays** (0:36)
A bunch of people would be screenshotting it.

**John Coogan** (0:38)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:38)
And then they'd be, and years later they'd be like, see, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A big company was built in San Francisco.

**John Coogan** (0:43)
Yeah, yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:45)
And that was people being like, you're an idiot. Yeah. You're an idiot. Yeah. And now it's like, I hate you and I want it.

**John Coogan** (0:52)
It's not that direct, but it is high stakes because like the, 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, okay, Android's like the ad supported one and iPhone's still printing lots of profits and things are understood.

**Jordi Hays** (1:36)
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. Yep, yep.

**John Coogan** (1:47)
And then you had like the Mag 7 where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around single digit trillions. And so they can sort of like be comfortable with each other.

**Jordi Hays** (1:57)
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 Nvidia has open models. Microsoft and they own a lot of open AI.

**John Coogan** (2:11)
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 play or a 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.

**Jordi Hays** (2:40)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (2:41)
Founding a company and growing it to $5 trillion. That's just child's play compared to getting on X.

**Jordi Hays** (2:46)
He's like, fine, I'll go to the dive bar. Yeah, yeah. Go to the internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.

**John Coogan** (2:51)
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 and 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 with 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.
The backdrop here is basically just like we went through a hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over what it will take to 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. 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 OpenAI 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.