What happens if China pulls the plug on open-source AI? | Ep 21

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:00)
The best open-source models are coming from China. It's basically going to hurt the AI strategies, tons and tons of companies that are building with an open-source first mindset.

**Munjal Shah** (0:07)
Mathematically untenable. If one model, GPT-40's level from OpenAI is $6 an hour. So you can't use 31 because the math blows up on you unless you use open-source. If you run our constellation all on open AI models, it'll cost you $105 an hour. That's more than the human. The real power of all of this AI is not replacing work you do today and making it cheaper, that's actually not working super well. Thanks to our friends at Paypal, the exclusive sponsor for This Week in AI.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:36)
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**Munjal Shah** (0:41)
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**Alex** (0:45)
Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in AI. My name is Alex and today we are talking about the possible end of open-way models from China, AI live bearishness, benchmarks, the great AI data race and more. To help us understand it all, we brought two leading AI startup founders to the show today. In one corner, we have Anastasios Angelopoulos from the company Arena, now previously known as LM Arena. It's a brilliant dataset for tracking comparative AI model performance. It's now a big darn startup, having raised $150 million in a blockbuster series A. Anastasios, welcome back to the show.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:17)
Happy to be here.

**Alex** (1:18)
Glad to have you back. We also have Munjal Shah from the hot shores of vertical AI. His company Hippocratic AI is working on all things clinical voice agents in the healthcare space, with more than $400 million raised, including $126 million at a $3.5 billion valuation recently, and version 5 of its Polaris ERR model out. The company is shooting for mega scale. Munjal, welcome to the show.

**Munjal Shah** (1:40)
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Alex** (1:42)
I'm so glad to have you both here because AI news is dropping like you wouldn't believe. The latest thing that's going on that we all have to talk about is the possibility that Reuters reported this morning that China may end the release of its AI models to the world. Now, we all know that Chinese open weight models have been incredibly clutch, super powerful, super cheap. A lot of startups build on them.
And if that ends, it does seem to kind of reorient or reorder the broader AI landscape. Anastasios, starting with you, first reactions to this news because I think we're all still digesting a bit.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (2:14)
I mean, listen, a lot of people are going to be made really upset by this because the best open source models are coming from China.
And so, it's going to do a couple of things. The first thing it's going to do is it's basically going to hurt the AI strategy of tons and tons of companies that are building with an open source first mindset. The GLM is basically a frontier quality model. It's comparable to a lot of the frontier offerings from OpenAI.

**Alex** (2:37)
GLM 5.2.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (2:38)
Yep, that's right. GLM 5.2.
And so, if we can't get 5.3, 5.4 or GLM 6 or whatever, what have you, what's going to happen is that people are going to reconsider what models to use, whether they're going to go with a closed-source strategy or, you know, and this is the second thing that's going to happen, it's of course going to promote open-source development inside the US and Europe of models that, you know, we can actually rely on to be released within the confines of our actually sovereign nation.

**Alex** (3:10)
So do you think that this is a net benefit then to American and European AI labs or also American and European AI startups?

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (3:18)
So yeah, that's exactly the right question because there's a bunch of game theory you need to play out if you're China. If you're China, you should be thinking, okay, how do I make China win? And so if you shut off open-source AI now, let's be honest, China is doing well there, but they're not exactly winning the AI race yet. So by shutting it off and not giving Chinese companies the ability to compete on the global stage, not giving them the ability to sort of access global data, not giving them the ability to access global customers, what they might actually be doing is sort of cutting the budding trees that they have in China related to AI and then promoting the development of Western open-source AI. So to some extent, it might actually be good for our national security.