The AI Cold War, Odyssey Rips, Tyler Cowen Joins | Danny Yeung, Connor Love, Kahlil Lalji, Tarek Mansour, Tony Zhao

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Today is Monday, July 20th, 2026 Let's go to the fans at home. We are live from TBPN UltraDom, the template technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We had a fantastic talk with Eric, the co-CEO of Ramp on Thursday. But we are excited to be back. It's Monday and there's a lot of news, the big stuff, Kimi K3 dropped. But first, we should recap the weekend. How was your weekend?

**Jordi Hays** (0:33)
The elephant in the room that I'm wearing a suit.

**John Coogan** (0:35)
Yes, the elephant in the room. Did somebody say that? The elephant in the room. Jordi's suited up.

**Jordi Hays** (0:40)
He's feeling good.

**John Coogan** (0:41)
He's refreshed.

**Jordi Hays** (0:41)
Yeah, refreshed. I, yeah, I was in the elephant weekend. You got dragged to the old country. Yes, yes, exactly.
Really fun time, glad to be back. Very, very refreshed.

**John Coogan** (0:55)
Very fun. I was at a Caruso property this weekend. And I got to say, being there, being at the Miramar, Rosewood, I can never vote for him for public office ever again.

**Jordi Hays** (1:07)
Why? Because you want him to develop more properties like that?

**John Coogan** (1:09)
I want him laser focused on resorts and malls.

**Jordi Hays** (1:13)
That doesn't really hold up because the whole point was that there was some possibility that he could make greater Los Angeles, something like his incredible properties.

**John Coogan** (1:22)
You got to get a Rosewood in every city in America.

**Jordi Hays** (1:26)
Or take private of the city of Los Angeles, turn it all into a Caruso property.

**John Coogan** (1:31)
Potentially. But it was a good weekend. Glad to be back. The timeline was burning up over the weekend, over the AI cold war that's breaking out between the US frontier labs and Chinese open source. There's been a whole bunch of new Chinese open source models that have dropped with some promising benchmarks. The latest one that everyone is up in arms about is Moonshots Kimi K3.
It was unveiled last Thursday. Now, they aren't actually...

**Jordi Hays** (2:02)
I kept opening X and thinking, looking, scrolling a few times, thinking, oh, I'm happy for you or sorry that happened. I put my phone away.
I feel like I missed a lot.

**John Coogan** (2:15)
Yeah, I mean, it's gated behind an app right now. The weights are not actually open just yet. That should happen Monday if things go to plan. But of course, there's a lot going back and forth with the administration. People are weighing every possible consequence of this.
It's the classic, it's over, we're back. Is this good for semiconductors? Is this bad for semiconductors? Is this Jevons Paradox? Is it the counter example of Jevons Paradox? It's all very interesting debates and everyone's coming out with their own opinion. Dean Ball was going back and forth with two people, David Sachs and also Emile Michael were duking it out on the timeline, fighting it out back and forth.
But decent takes on both sides, lots to chew through. The headlines for Kimi are impressive, but not wildly surprising based on the current trend lines and model progress. But it does seem to invalidate the thesis that open source would start falling behind, which was something that was start... There was that chart from the government, I believe, that showed closed model progress was accelerating on this particular exponential and open models were falling behind. This seems like a proper catch up, something that was predicted from many lab leaders that the six-month gap, three-month gap, nine-month gap, it will remain just that gap for the foreseeable future. But there are, of course, a bunch of other nuances here.
In the most above board scenario, here's what happened. The moonshot team is just a bunch of highly talented AI researchers who marshaled enough compute to release a great model. Open sourcing Kimi is a great way to grab attention, attract talent, drive demand for hosted API services that are more turnkey eventually. There's a very reasonable business model behind open sourcing. Red Hat Linux, of course, is an open source company owned by IBM. Now, I think the acquisition price was in the $30 billion range, and at any point, you could just say, I'm just doing Red Hat on my own, but a lot of companies pay for consulting, hosted, and all sorts of different services around the open source piece of software. And so, that's sort of like the bull case, like everything's going well. The more skeptical folks on the timeline are pointing to ideas such as maybe the compute was smuggled in to China against chip controls, maybe the data was exfiltrated from frontier lab APIs routed through wrapper companies, maybe this is a distillation attack. The open source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies, it's geopolitical warfare, it's the AI Cold War. And there might even be spies inside companies stealing IP directly, and so that's sort of like the bad version. The reality is probably a mix of both, but we'll know more over time and we'll hear more statements from the labs and from all sorts of different participants to understand. There are people who are going back and forth on, if you ask Kimmy its name, will it just say it's Claude or GBT? And there were some examples of people doing that, it seemed like it was Photoshopped, that also seems like the easiest thing to fix possibly, it's just put it in the prompt, put it in the fine tuning, find and replace.