Why Tech Giants Are Protecting Open-Source AI, Runway’s New Model Router for AI

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, July 24th. Today on the show, big tech giants, including NVIDIA, Microsoft and Meta, signed an open letter cautioning against overregulation of open weight models. We'll talk about the implications of this letter for the industry.
We'll then dive into Runway's new AI model router for generative media. We'll talk to the company's Chief Product Officer and talk about the router landscape at large. And to close out the show, we've got a special edition of the editor's cut on how investors are looking at the opportunities in nuclear startups. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.
A who's who of big tech companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta along with fast growing AI startups like Replet and Reflection, all signed a public letter outlining why US policymakers should steer clear of overregulating open weight models. That has very much become a concern for many tech companies as impressive early reactions to moonshot AIs. Kimi K3 has stirred debate around what regulation is and isn't appropriate for open weight models. I want to bring on Jai Das, president, partner and co-founder of Sapphire Ventures for his view on all of this. Jai, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Jai Das** (1:34)
Hey Akash, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be back here.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:38)
Excited to unpack this all with you. So this letter that all these companies signed here, basically says that, hey, we don't think you should take a heavy hand regulating open weight AI.
We think the US should become a leader in open weight models, broadly speaking. What was your reaction to this letter?

**Jai Das** (1:59)
Yeah, I'm not surprised, right? Because this is not about technology or AI or leadership of the US. It all comes down about economic incentives, right?
The people who signed the letters are all the people who don't have the leading closed source models, right? So it's anthropic and OpenAI are not in the letter. And all the people who signed the letter are worried that, you know, if all the economic margins or all the customer revenue goes to these models, there won't be a lot of margins and revenues going to, you know, the people providing the middleware, the chips, or even companies like Meta and Reflit and everybody else. So I think the people signing this letter, they have the right intentions, but their real intention is all economic and motivation to capture as much of the customer dollars as possible.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:55)
I mean, I was trying to think about who also hasn't signed the letter yet, and I say yet because these types of letters, we do know the companies join later on. So maybe just didn't reach their inbox fast enough, but I mean, Google was not a signer on that letter too, and they obviously have their closed source model.
Amazon was not there. Amazon though, I think, I mean, they do have a lot of open weight models on their AWS platform, so I don't know.

**Jai Das** (3:24)
I think Amazon would absolutely sign it at some point. And remember, Amazon also, or AWS, also let go of their model team, right? So they're not building a proprietary model anytime, right? Right, right. And if you look back in history, whenever there is anything that captures a lot of dollars from a proprietary perspective, always open source shows up and takes part of those economic benefits, right? That has happened. We have been lucky enough to invest in companies like MySQL and Red Hat. And I was part of when first open source GNU compiler, like Richard Stallman started, right? I worked with him on that.
So, it's just a matter of time before these open weight models would come in and try to extract some of the economic value that was going and taken away by just the proprietary model. So I'm actually surprised by this.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:17)
You are or you're not?

**Jai Das** (4:19)
I'm not.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:19)
You're not? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Jai Das** (4:20)
Right, right, right. If you look at it, it happened in databases, right? People forget that both ClickHouse and Databricks all started out as open source company, right? Spark is Apache, Spark is an open source project, and ClickHouse is built on top of Yandex, which is again, actually ClickHouse itself, it's an open source data warehouse that is out there.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:45)
And ClickHouse and Spark, we haven't talked about it too much on this show, but just remind us those are database software?

**Jai Das** (4:51)