Sriram Krishnan on Open Source AI's Biggest Week Yet

**Sriram Krishnan** (0:00)
If you can bring it back to very business first principles, if you're providing a product of value, capitalism will find a way to make the supply chain work for you. So if you have an open-weight model that is providing value, that means that every part of the stack underneath, whether it is a new cloud, the chip provider, somebody who provides gas turbines, or fire suppression is going to orient itself to provide value.
If you're providing a product of value, capitalism will take care of all the rest. If you go look at how the rest of the ecosystem is going, the growth is pretty strong and spectacular, and I think you're going to see that continue.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
Open source AI is moving faster than ever, and the balance of power in the industry may be shifting. In this episode, Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini are joined by former White House AI Policy Advisor, Sriram Krishnan, to unpack with the latest wave of open models means for frontier labs, AI policy, pricing, cyber security, and America's position in the global AI race.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:06)
We are back. We are live with Sriram Krishnan, who just finished his tenure at the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and held senior roles at Microsoft, Metta, Snap, and Twitter. So Sriram, we're so glad to have you on. Welcome to MTS.

**Sriram Krishnan** (1:25)
Thank you. I've been a fan of everything you folks have been doing for the last few months and excited to be here. I think this is the first time in about two years, I've been able to do a video appearance without a suit and tie on. So I am so excited to be out of that.
Yeah.

**Theo Jaffee** (1:44)
Amazing.
So there's so much going on in open source last week. We just discussed, we had Grok Build was open source and then we had Thinking Machines and then Kimi K3 and then Qwen 3.8. So you tweeted the other day, Kimi K3 is a big moment with multiple implications for the entire industry. Could you go into a little more detail on that? What are these implications?

**Sriram Krishnan** (2:05)
So if you go back maybe four or five months, I think there was a moment in time when the only leading models where I think Opus 4.6 or 4.7 at the time, GPD 5.4 or 5.5 or wherever, be aware, and it felt like there was really no one else, and we were on this curve or some self-improvement where the frontier labs were really going to draw really far away from everyone else. I think the last few weeks, if you are in the token consumption business, which I am and I think many of you and your viewers are, it's been a great time because, let's see, you had Elon and Michael at Cursor, the SpaceX XAI team come out with Glock 45, which I've been using. It's a fantastic model. I think we forgot to mention this. We had Alex Wang and Meta come out with Muse Spark, which is also awesome. Last week, we had Mira Thinke come out with Inkling. I don't know their version number, but the first version of that model, which I think is nearly sota on many, many benchmarks. But I think the big news over the last three, four days was obviously Kimi K3 coming out, I think on Thursday or Friday. And then I think the last 24 hours, I haven't really played with it yet, but Qwen coming out. So there's a lot of, just a lot of choices and alternatives coming out. And what I was referring to is the Kimi K3 is the following.
One is that it's just great to have choice in the ecosystem and to be able to point your harness of choice, or your agent of choice to multiple models. Second, I think we are in this really weird moment now, where some of the American frontier models are constrained. For example, on cyber and on security, and I was talking to a friend of mine, where this person was actually starting to do security work using Kimi K3 rather than Fable, because with Fable, he would run into these refusals and safeguards. So that seems like a very weird spot to be, which we can talk about for a second.
I think it's also, you know, it's probably inevitable that if you are having choices from where you get your intelligence tokens from, that's going to put pricing pressure on the frontier models, which means I think you'll probably see the frontier labs have to drop token prices or find ways to, you know, find ways to match pricing, which means it's probably going to erode into their gross margin. It's probably great for the neoclouds and every other layer of the stack, because if you are a neocloud, like a base 10 or a fireworks, or if you just have a bunch of black walls and you can power it and you can run that, and you can capture some of the economics, which is probably going to go to the frontier labs. So I think it's great as a consumer, I think it's great for the ecosystem. Lots of obviously questions on security, on distillation, on how this is good. A very, very interesting moment.