Watching history unfold between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW) it has been obvious to me that this could be a major turning point in perspectives on open models, but one that’ll take years to be obvious. As AI becomes more powerful, existing power structures will grapple with their roles relative to existing companies. Some in open models frame this as “not your weights, not your brain,” but it points to a much bigger problem when governments realize this.

If AI is the most powerful technology, why would any global entity let a single U.S. company (or government) control their relationship to it?

I got Dean W. Ball of the great Hyperdimensional newsletter onto the SAIL Media weekly Substack live to discuss this. In the end, we agree that the recent actions by the DoW — especially the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk (which Dean and I both vehemently disagree with) — points to open models being the 5-10 year stable equilibrium for power centers.

The point of this discussion is:

* Why do open models avoid some of the power struggles we’ve seen play out last week?

* How do we bridge short term headwinds for open models towards long-term strength?

* The general balance of capabilities between open and closed models.

Personally, I feel the need to build open models more than ever and am happy to see more constituencies wake up to it. What I don’t know is how to fund and organize that. Commoditizing one’s compliments is a valid strategy, but it starts to break down when AI models cost closer to a trillion dollars than a hundred million. With open models being very hard to monetize, there’s a bumpy road ahead for figuring out who builds these models in face of real business growth elsewhere in the AI stack.

Enjoy and please share any feedback you have on this tricky topic!

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and where ever you get your podcasts. For other Interconnects interviews, go here.

Chapters

* 00:00 Intro: is the Anthropic supply chain risk good or bad for open models?

* 04:03 Funding open models and the widening frontier gap

* 12:33 Sovereign AI and global demand for alternatives

* 20:55 Open model ecosystem: Qwen, usability, and short-term outlook

* 28:20 Government power, nationalization risk, and financializing compute

Transcript

00:00:00 Nathan Lambert: Okay. We are live and people will start joining. I’m very happy to catch up with Dean. I think as we were setting this up, the news has been breaking that the official supply chain risk designation was filed. This is not a live reaction to that. If we get any really, really interesting news, we’ll talk about it. I think one of the undercurrents that I’ve felt that this week where everything happened is gonna touch on is open models, but there’s not an obvious angle. I think I will frame this to Dean to start, which is how does-- Like, there’s two sides of open models. One is that there’s the kind of cliche like, not my weights, not your weights, not your mind, where like somebody could take it away if not an open model, which people are boosting like, “Oh, like Anthropic’s gonna take away their intelligence.” But the other side is people worried about open models existing that the Department of War can just take and use for any purpose that it wants. And I feel like both of these are a little cliche. And the core question is like, is this type of event where more control is coming towards AI and more multi-party interest, like is that gonna be good or bad for the open weight model ecosystem?

00:01:12 Dean Ball: My guess is that in the long run, this is probably profoundly good for open weight AI. And like the whole reason I got in, like, so I became interested in frontier AI governance. I did something totally different with my time before. I wrote about different kinds of policy and studied different kinds of policy. And the reason I got into this was because it immediately occurred to me that the government was gonna... I was like, okay, let’s assume we’re building super intelligence soon or whatever, like very advanced AI that seems like really important and powerful. That’s gonna be something that I depend on, like for my day-to-day life. I’m gonna need it for all kinds of things. It’s gonna profoundly implicate my freedom of expression as an American and my exercise of my liberty and all that. And yet it’s also gonna profoundly implicate national security. And so the government’s gonna have its hands all over it, and they also might not like me using it because I might use it, and others might use it to challenge the status quo in various ways, to challenge the existing power structures which the government is a part of. So we have a political problem on our hands here, in my view.

00:02:36 Dean Ball: It immediately occurred to me that we’re gonna have this huge problem of like, this is gonna be a conflict because this is something that’s gonna enormously implicate American speech and liberty, and also it’s gonna have legitimate national security issues, and also the government’s gonna want it because of bad power-seeking reasons. And so that’s always a part of the picture. And my view was this is just a fight that’s gonna play out over the coming decades, and I wanna be a part of this fight. But number two, in that fight, you have to have an insurance policy, and open weight is the insurance policy. Open weight is the way we can always say yes, but we can build the open ecosystem. We can do that. And so I think in the fullness of time, this is gonna be beneficial, but the problem is there’s a lot of coordination and economic problems that have to be solved here. It’s not just a matter of hoping that Google and Meta or whomever else, or the Chinese companies, by virtue, out of the goodness of their hearts continue to open-source things. That’s not scalable. There has to be a reason to do it. So what are the institutional dynamics open weight gonna look like in the long term? I don’t really know, but it feels deeply under theorized.

00:04:03 Nathan Lambert: I think it’s hard to fund is the thing. I mean, we saw Qwen had their turmoil this week, which is timely, and I’m not that surprised because the stakes for these companies is so high, and they all are trying to make sure their companies win in it. And people will say like, “Oh, Meta should commoditize their complements and release open models.” But no one’s ever commoditized their complements with something that costs a trillion dollars to make. Like, that’s a line item. Like, is Apple gonna commoditize... Apple commoditizing their complement would be them doing the... They could spend just as much as all the other tech companies are on CapEx and spend hundreds of billions of dollars, but they’re choosing not to. And I just like, I agree that long term it should be better, but if we never bridge that gap, does it actually materialize? Like, the crank is being turned of these models getting better and better. GPT 5.4 released today, excited to try it.

00:05:02 Nathan Lambert: But like, where does it go? Like, what I’m working on is totally falling behind the frontier. We’re the foundation of research, but it’s like I see it already slipping.

00:05:13 Dean Ball: So I kinda think, yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s gonna get bad in the short term, it’s gonna be bleak, right? There’s just no doubt about that in my view. Because we’re in this period, like I think the pace of frontier progress is gonna continue. My own view is that, like, just ‘cause I peer in and use the open weight Chinese models on a fairly regular basis, and I kinda just feel as though the gap has widened between the US frontier and the open frontier. Unfortunately, it’s so sad that US frontier and open frontier are increasingly distinct things. But I do feel as though that probably is true. And that’s probably gonna continue because in the next, like, in the early stages of a new technology, you would expect for the vertically integrated players to be the ones who do the best. And over time, the modular players can win, and part of that is ‘cause eventually you do get to good enough, right? Like, eventually, I think most people think the iPhone is good enough now. There was a time when every year the iPhone upgrade was like, “Oh my God, this is so much better.” Intelligence is maybe different, but maybe not for a lot of things.

00:06:37 Nathan Lambert: Well, like, there’s no iPhone that you can buy from anyone. Nothing you can buy from anyone but Apple is nearly as good. That’s the concern. It’s like, is it gonna be Anthropic that like, yeah, it stopped getting better, but you can’t rebuild it. Like, you can’t make the open source version.

00:06:51 Nathan Lambert: I also think I had a later question, which is like, the weights are so much less of a concern for me. So like, somebody dropping a two-trillion-parameter model that’s open weights and way better than anything else that somebody has built and released in the...

Dean Ball on open models and government control