正在审理的 Anthropic v. Department of War 案正为开放模型的未来确立微妙先例。Dean Ball 指出，该诉讼涉及 AI 开放模型与政府机构间的法律争议，其判决将深刻影响开源 AI 的监管框架。此案正在塑造行政权力与开放权重模型之间的边界，为政府如何管控开放模型提供关键司法参照，可能改变开源人工智能的发展轨迹。
原文 · 未翻译
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 of the great newsletter onto the 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?
正在审理的 Anthropic v. Department of War 案正为开放模型的未来确立微妙先例。Dean Ball 指出，该诉讼涉及 AI 开放模型与政府机构间的法律争议，其判决将深刻影响开源 AI 的监管框架。此案正在塑造行政权力与开放权重模型之间的边界，为政府如何管控开放模型提供关键司法参照，可能改变开源人工智能的发展轨迹。
原文 · 保持原样，未翻译
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 of the great newsletter onto the 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.
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 open, it almost doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the harness and the tools and the setup you need to make it into a Claude-like system. Like, you need what, eighty nodes of H100s that cost a hundred thousand dollars a day to run and expertise to make it a system. It’s like the shifting away from weights is also happening. I don’t think it’s happening in this open versus closed ecosystem at the surface level of the discussion. So that’s why I’m just like, I don’t know if it’s gonna exist. The thing that I could see happening is that open weights models are niche, and they help these Claude-like models, but there’s not an alternative in that universe. So it’s like, is the government capable of actually making this alternative exist? I don’t know. Like, I don’t know if you can Manhattan Project this, and I wouldn’t advocate for it.
00:07:53 Dean Ball: I actually think about it from the opposite perspective, because I think that what happens if the government follows through on what they’ve threatened with Anthropic, which is to make it so that basically any military contractor cannot have any commercial relations with Anthropic, which means NVIDIA can’t sell GPUs to them for anything. Amazon can’t sell cloud services to them. Amazon and NVIDIA also can’t be invested in them, by the way, if you take any commercial relations at its face value. Now, that’s not a power the government actually has, but nonetheless, if this harassment campaign continues, I think what it probably does... You know, I spend a lot of time in international policy, dealing, talking to foreign governments and civil society in foreign countries, and they already have major trust issues with respect to the US closed source models because they think the US government is gonna come in and disable the models. Like, the American president will get mad at Brazil, say, and in addition to putting tariffs or sanctions, the US president will say, “Yeah, we’re also gonna turn off all your public services that are dependent upon American closed source models.” Right? So people view that as this profound threat, and people are legitimately scared of that in other countries.
00:10:00 Dean Ball: I think this turns that fear up another meaningful degree, and probably not incorrectly, by the way, probably rightfully so. And so I kinda look at this and I think, well, now a lot of American companies might also have that concern, and so you certainly have a demand side of people who are gonna be like, “I get this. It is a risk to use anything where I have a commercial relationship. ‘Cause once I have a commercial relationship, the government can regulate that. Can I find some way of getting out of it?” I think there’s gonna be demand for that. Whether or not that demand produces supply, I think will depend on... It might just not be possible, that’s true. But I think you’ve never had a more favorable demand picture, and I suspect that on the margin, this probably will favor open in the longer run.
00:10:44 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. So there’s a few ways that I think about this. I have this thing, like ATOM Project and all this other stuff I do, and it’s like, how do I meaningfully advocate for this? I think there’s something, like I work at AI2, and AI2 has budgets of order of a hundred million dollars and can train decent models. But if I wanted to redo an AI2, like my method for getting that type of money, it’s mostly gonna be like befriending a billionaire. And it seems like philanthropy dice roll in the near term is a way to get it. But then, like, maybe it really is some long slog of a multi-industrial consortium that takes a couple years off the ground and slowly, like, Google’s, or all these Netflix and all these five hundred billion dollar smaller companies are gonna give millions of dollars to have somebody else do it because they can’t get the billion dollars themselves, but they know they need to have it existed.
00:11:31 Dean Ball: And sovereign wealth funds. Right. Sovereign wealth funds everywhere can do that, right? There’s trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth. There’s pension funds, public employee pension funds. A lot of people can chip into this and it’s possible. This is like, Yann LeCun thinks this is the inevitable outcome. He thinks that the future is gonna be that some sort of global consortium gets together and builds this, because no one country is gonna be able to own it, because it’s gonna be too important. I’ve always kinda doubted that, and I’ve always thought that that outcome is probably a bad outcome for the world, honestly.
00:12:06 Nathan Lambert: That’s a bad outcome for how good the AI is.
00:12:09 Dean Ball: That’s correct. It’s a socialist outcome, you know? It’s not communism, but it is democratic socialism, and I’m not a democratic socialist, so I’m not a super big fan of that. But at the same time, I have to be honest that I kinda think that this probably does increase the odds of that precise outcome coming to bear.
00:12:33 Nathan Lambert: I think something that comes sooner is that a lot of these super wealthy countries are gonna realize they can have real... Like, they can do some sort of sovereign AI and make some sort of noise, particularly starting with open models. I think there’s the Institute for Foundation Models, which is based on the UAE university system. Like, that’s--
00:12:53 Dean Ball: That’s very UAE-coded, yeah.
00:12:55 Nathan Lambert: They’ve been playing that for years, and they can keep doing this. Their models are gonna be pretty good, and I think there’s gonna be more people that do this. There’s the SWISS initiative in EU, which is on one hand doing a good job, on the other hand plagued by the most obvious European limitations of talent cycling and consortium life. I think these things are gonna become more of a thing in the next year, but I don’t know exactly how they impact the... They don’t impact the frontier of AI, but maybe they’re just like how the geopolitics and power of AI evolves. And I for some reason feel like open models need to be the thing that they’re gonna do because if they have a closed model that’s not as good, it doesn’t really give them any sort of power. But I don’t have a good enough world view for what that actually does, and if there’s more EU models, if India actually has their act together and trains a solid model. I don’t know what that does, but I feel like it’s probably gonna happen.
00:13:54 Dean Ball: Yeah. I mean, it’s really super interesting ‘cause I think the other thing-- that will be inherently... I mean, it will be a Linux compared to a macOS, you know? It will not be as good of an experience for people. But then it becomes strange. Like, I don’t think macOS is as appealing of a thing if it’s viewed to be owned by the US government, right? And in fact, part of the reason I think that Apple is able to make its case quite credibly to consumers and businesses is they have resisted US government pressure to turn things over before. People might remember about a decade ago, there was this shooter in San Bernardino, California, and the FBI tried to force Apple to release iPhone data, and Apple said, “No, we’re not gonna expose this information.” Now, I think the FBI eventually just hacked it anyway, but that’s a separate issue. It’s a matter of principle here.
00:15:01 Dean Ball: So yeah, I think it’s an interesting question: do we expect for the gap between the open frontier and the American closed frontier to widen in the near future, especially just because of how much compute they’re gonna have?
00:15:30 Nathan Lambert: A hundred percent. And data and talent. Like, a hundred percent. It’s happening.
00:15:34 Dean Ball: Data, talent. And it’s compounding, right? I mean, this has always been my view. And how much, I’m not sure, but I think it could be quite significant because these things are compounding benefits. And so if you expect them to just continue compounding, then all of a sudden it gets pretty bleak pretty quickly, would be my fear.
00:16:00 Nathan Lambert: One of the... I mean, what’s your take on this? Why has it not compounded so much faster? Like, I feel like these three companies are spending, I don’t know, 10X what the Chinese labs are spending, and you only get like a little bit better model. Like, I believed so full-heartedly that Claude and ChatGPT and all these models are much better, and I expect them to become better by increasing margin, but it’s still confusing why they’re not already more ahead.
00:16:29 Dean Ball: I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I think they are that ahead, and it’s just difficult to show up in benchmarks for the obvious reasons that benchmarks get chased. And like, I do feel that with the coding agents and with certain use cases, I do just feel like, wow, the American frontier is just way ahead, profoundly ahead of the Chinese frontier there. But there’s a lot of other things where you do kinda saturate how good you can be. I suspect that a very large fraction of AI usage is essentially glorified Google search. Even though I don’t think AI is glorified Google search, I suspect that a lot of what people use it for is that, at the consumer level. And it isn’t obvious to me how much better you can get at things like that. But my guess would be that over the next five years, I would guess the American labs really take off, in part because of compute, data, internal deployments for recursive self-improvement style stuff. And also, it’s amazing how we talk about that as just a normal thing now.
00:18:05 Nathan Lambert: I think there will be a ceiling on it. Like, they’re gonna get a ton of improvement-- The gains are insane. It’s like, personally, at my job, I’ve been a lot of a research manager and just chasing shit down to get a model out the door. But now I can take on hard engineering tasks because I’m like, “Okay, might as well do this at the same time.” Like, going from zero to a hundred software engineers at anyone’s fingertips is worth a lot in terms of exploration. But the next, like, from a hundred to ten thousand is like, people can mess that up type thing. But that’s a huge gain.
00:18:37 Dean Ball: I kind of agree. I think there’ll be a sigmoid there too. But then the other thing that will happen is, like, what I sort of wonder is will the AI companies, will the current model vendors, will they eventually become more like true infrastructure companies where what they actually do is they have models that design their own chips and models that design their own data centers and models that design their own successors. And so it’s this hugely vertically integrated thing, and what you’re really getting access to is not just the model itself, but you’re getting access to this highly optimized hardware, physical world infrastructure. And again, that’s kind of already the case, but does that become even more the case? And then that’s truly insurmountable for any open player. That’s definitionally insurmountable for an open player, and that becomes scary too. But again, this is why I’ve always felt so good about the position of the US closed source labs. This is why I’ve always been pretty bullish on them and have my concerns about open.
00:20:07 Dean Ball: But to the extent the US government makes it impossible to trust closed source models, you do provide an advantage to open there. You’re giving a shot in the arm. If you like open source, you should hope that the supply chain risk designation against Anthropic is quite broad.
00:20:09 Nathan Lambert: It’s a rough thing to hope for.
00:20:09 Dean Ball: I mean, you shouldn’t actually hope for it, but I just mean, like, if that’s the only thing you care about in the world is open source, then--
00:20:17 Nathan Lambert: I would say that anyone that only cares about open source probably is not thinking through any of these principles. It just gets really bad if you only have-- Like, AI is not gonna be meaningful lift to the economy and nor sustainable if everything is open. Like, if models are truly commoditized, things look kind of rough out there.
00:20:36 Dean Ball: I think a world where models get commoditized is a really bleak world too, actually. And yeah, this is why I’m very worried about what the US government is doing. But I think that it helps on the margin, though. It probably helps on the margin in terms of waking people up. That still is my view.
00:20:55 Nathan Lambert: I am a little surprised by the Qwen stuff, but I think there’s-- It’s like, at some point, I knew there was gonna be a year where a lot of the open model efforts just died because they’re just too expensive and too similar. But at the same time, having a lot of efforts that are somewhat similar but exploring a lot of the minor permutations in modeling space to figure out what works for people who use open models is actually quite good. I’m very bearish on the reflection style approach, which is build a lab, build an incredible model, drop it, make a bank selling it on-prem. Because on-prem is not that distinct from a business model as having a closed model. You could sell a closed model on-prem with the right IP controls. But then the person who actually wins open is by trying a whole bunch of tiny different things, understanding what is actually a meaningful differentiator in private data, in certain deployments and whatever, and then really iterating on that with a community. And that’s why I was like, Qwen is the closest to doing this by being so close to the community, and it’s so distinct from what a lot of the other labs are betting on.
00:22:05 Nathan Lambert: But I see the pressure going away and kind of reducing diversity onto standards, because standards also make inference more efficient. Using open models is really rough. I think some of the best open models have really had rough launches. I think GPT-OSS had a horrible launch in terms of usability and is now one of the most popular models of all time. Qwen 3.5, it’s like researchers I work with are like, “Oh, let’s see if we can do some basic RL baselines on it,” and all the software stack is kinda broken. It takes a few weeks to get it going. And this is ‘cause all the models change differently, and closed labs just have such an advantage there ‘cause they should conceivably ship things on day one that work. I mean, don’t talk about Claude’s runtime, but that’s fine.
00:22:42 Dean Ball: And don’t talk about the GPT-5 auto router either. But yeah, no, totally. I think that’s right.
00:22:53 Dean Ball: I think fullness of time, I’m bullish on open source in the long run, fairly bearish in the next five years. The next five years are gonna matter quite a bit. And there is a lot of cope in both open source world and also... I don’t really hear it so much in open source world. I think open source world is actually more honest about this. But where the cope is so bad is in global civil society discourse. Like, I was in India for the AI Impact Summit recently, and they are just smoking the copium, being like, “We are gonna do everything on subfrontier open source models, and we’re just gonna diffuse those, and that’s all we’re gonna need in our economy.” And I just think that’s, if you’re India, that’s really not the bet you wanna make. I understand these are resource-constrained countries. They have a lot of acute constraints that they face, but nonetheless, I think that’s probably not a good bet.
00:24:05 Nathan Lambert: Well, it’s even if those long tail models will work like manufacturing has worked, where it’s like Apple has put hundreds of billions of dollars into the manufacturing ecosystem in China to get absolute fine margins and scale. Like, if you really-- these things are gonna be used so much that that fine margin is actually gonna matter a lot, and it is not cheap to get that fine margin. You can’t just YOLO a DeepSeek V3 and spend five million dollars in compute and be done. It’s still gonna be expensive for a long time.
00:24:34 Dean Ball: Yeah, it requires-- I think the Chinese approach, in the long run, if China’s gonna continue its strategy and they want to be competitive with the American frontier, they’re gonna have to fully socialize that, I think. I don’t think DeepSeek alone is gonna be able to do this, and I don’t think even Alibaba alone is gonna be able to do this. I think they’re going to need some sort of collective effort. Especially because of the export controls, the American export controls. They’re gonna have to centralize compute. They’re gonna have to centralize all these things, and talent and data and all that.
00:25:17 Nathan Lambert: I don’t see it happening. Like, maybe someone gets officially AGI pilled, and I don’t know that much about China. But the things I know about China, it seems like that would be a big lift, and it would take a lot of time to actually do it. Like, all the companies would have to give up their biggest... All the cloud companies are like tech companies making a lot of money. They would be like, “We have to give up what?”
00:25:42 Dean Ball: No, it would be a tough sell. Obviously, if the Chinese government decides they want to do it, they absolutely will. But in total, it will be a tough sell. My experience having had diplomatic engagements of many sorts with Chinese government-- and a lot of Chinese tech policy is actually not directly set by the government. It’s actually more kind of civil society, academia and civil society adjacent to government. Had a lot of conversations with folks like that, and they’re definitely... It’s largely not a very AGI-pilled crew. I think AGI-pilled-ness probably has a rough correlation with GDP per capita, and I think China is about where you would expect based on their GDP per capita, maybe a little bit ahead, but not very so. But if they ever do get AGI pilled, that’s the kind of thing that they could consider, but then that’s still a pretty extraordinary outcome because the Chinese government would have to be willing to make these things and then give it away. And I kinda just don’t think they will.
00:27:11 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I mean, all the politics of control with how everybody thinks AI is so powerful are pointing to very value-destructive actions economically in order to achieve the end state that people determine to be right. It’s like supporting open source to the extent that you can to avoid situations like Anthropic being labeled a supply chain risk and having interactions like that totally decimating runway of AI productivity. Like, if the companies are really gonna commit to open source for other things, then they’re gonna lose money. And I see this in-- China’s economy would be taking a gigantic hit doing this. And that’s kind of a common theme of what we’re talking about is that the interface of AI in an economic fashion is gonna make the next few years really weird.
00:28:06 Dean Ball: I hope so.
00:28:09 Nathan Lambert: I think things are gonna be weird, but I haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about how that interacts with political institutions. I thought about socially weird a lot, but I haven’t thought about power weird a lot.
00:28:20 Dean Ball: Oh, power weird is what I worry about all the time. What I worry about the most is I think it’s plausible that what we’re seeing... I’ve always had this concern. I have this dual problem of-- maybe I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. Maybe that’s just the critique, and it’s a fair critique. But I routinely complain about how people in government aren’t really... They pretend to take AI seriously, but they don’t take it that seriously. And they don’t really own the implications of advanced, of near term advanced AI and all that. I think we basically have transformative AI right now, but they don’t own that, because it’s annoying, it’s difficult, it’s conceptually challenging.
00:29:08 Dean Ball: But the flip side of that is that if people do start to take it very seriously, there’s the risk that they sort of lash out, that they get scared, and they lash out and do things that are rash, in a rush. And that actually creates very, very bad, much worse outcomes than you otherwise might have gotten. I think that’s a very fair risk, and I think it’s possible that you might see things like that happen within the U.S. I don’t think this particular incident with Anthropic is quite an example of that. But it’s possible that you do see that in the coming years, and that is in and of itself a pretty scary outcome because if the U.S. government decides that they want to nationalize the frontier labs, I think it could be one of the most tyrannical things we ever see happen in this country.
00:30:16 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know how to reply to this. I think things are... It’s serious times and I see so many... It feels like such a Sisyphean task to make more open models exist, but all the broader trends seem to point to that being a more stable equilibrium in a lot of ways. Like, good enough open models and keeping up with what we all feel happening in the closed model land.
00:30:50 Nathan Lambert: So I don’t know. I stay motivated, but I feel increasingly lost in terms of achieving it.
00:30:56 Dean Ball: I don’t think you should be. I think, look, I suspect the US government will not actually do it, and the best thing about America is that our general sort of-- I don’t wanna say incompetence, but the general sort of chaos of American institutions and decentralized confusingness of it all, it can often be quite frustrating, and it can sometimes be a detriment, but it can also be really great because we tend to not execute and follow through on our very worst ideas. And so I don’t think we’re going to do that. It doesn’t feel very American to do it. I worry about it because I worry about these rash reactions, and that’s why I fight as heavily as I do on things like this, despite not insignificant cost to me to do it, politically speaking. But that’s totally worth it because I care about this. I think everything, I think that will probably be fine. But yeah, I do agree. It’s a major risk. It’s a major risk, and it’s a weird world to think about, I’ll tell you that much.
00:32:16 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I don’t have a lot more to add. I’m sure we’ll continue this discussion. I think it warrants the space of it ‘cause that’s the... It’s one of the longer term things, but it’s not in the news cycle whatsoever, at least the open model angle. There’s just so many layers. People have to talk. Like, send feedback, people listening. I’ll even send this out as a podcast as well and just like, what do people think? How do we get to the places we want to get to?
00:32:46 Dean Ball: Well, one thing I’m particularly interested in is-- one of the items in the Trump administration action plan, which I worked on for those who don’t have that context, is this idea of financializing compute, creating a financial market, like basically a commodities market for compute so that you can buy, you know, like really robust. In the same way that you can buy electricity spot, electricity futures and electricity on the spot market and things like this, the wholesale. Could you do something like that for compute? That could really profoundly change the dynamics and the economics of AI production. It’s not gonna turn them over. It doesn’t flip them on their head, but it changes it quite meaningfully. And I’m very excited by that prospect.
00:33:48 Dean Ball: And that’s the kind of thing that I would be increasingly doing if this sort of interference of government into the frontier continues. What I suspect I’ll do is start developing some of those ideas which I developed earlier. I’m only one person. If those things start to seem relevant again, I totally will. Because anything to make it easier to produce AI for people that don’t have trillions of dollars will be extremely important.
00:34:38 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I think that... I don’t know. I’m happy to leave it there.
00:34:43 Dean Ball: Cool.
00:34:45 Nathan Lambert: I can let you get on your trip. It’s good to catch up. I’m early in the process of potentially coming to DC in a few months, so I will let you know if I do.
00:34:52 Dean Ball: Oh, please do. It’d be great to see you. We can record an episode of my podcast live.
00:34:58 Nathan Lambert: Sounds good. Okay. Thanks everybody for listening.
00:35:03 Dean Ball: Talk to y’all later. Bye.
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 open, it almost doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the harness and the tools and the setup you need to make it into a Claude-like system. Like, you need what, eighty nodes of H100s that cost a hundred thousand dollars a day to run and expertise to make it a system. It’s like the shifting away from weights is also happening. I don’t think it’s happening in this open versus closed ecosystem at the surface level of the discussion. So that’s why I’m just like, I don’t know if it’s gonna exist. The thing that I could see happening is that open weights models are niche, and they help these Claude-like models, but there’s not an alternative in that universe. So it’s like, is the government capable of actually making this alternative exist? I don’t know. Like, I don’t know if you can Manhattan Project this, and I wouldn’t advocate for it.
00:07:53 Dean Ball: I actually think about it from the opposite perspective, because I think that what happens if the government follows through on what they’ve threatened with Anthropic, which is to make it so that basically any military contractor cannot have any commercial relations with Anthropic, which means NVIDIA can’t sell GPUs to them for anything. Amazon can’t sell cloud services to them. Amazon and NVIDIA also can’t be invested in them, by the way, if you take any commercial relations at its face value. Now, that’s not a power the government actually has, but nonetheless, if this harassment campaign continues, I think what it probably does... You know, I spend a lot of time in international policy, dealing, talking to foreign governments and civil society in foreign countries, and they already have major trust issues with respect to the US closed source models because they think the US government is gonna come in and disable the models. Like, the American president will get mad at Brazil, say, and in addition to putting tariffs or sanctions, the US president will say, “Yeah, we’re also gonna turn off all your public services that are dependent upon American closed source models.” Right? So people view that as this profound threat, and people are legitimately scared of that in other countries.
00:10:00 Dean Ball: I think this turns that fear up another meaningful degree, and probably not incorrectly, by the way, probably rightfully so. And so I kinda look at this and I think, well, now a lot of American companies might also have that concern, and so you certainly have a demand side of people who are gonna be like, “I get this. It is a risk to use anything where I have a commercial relationship. ‘Cause once I have a commercial relationship, the government can regulate that. Can I find some way of getting out of it?” I think there’s gonna be demand for that. Whether or not that demand produces supply, I think will depend on... It might just not be possible, that’s true. But I think you’ve never had a more favorable demand picture, and I suspect that on the margin, this probably will favor open in the longer run.
00:10:44 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. So there’s a few ways that I think about this. I have this thing, like ATOM Project and all this other stuff I do, and it’s like, how do I meaningfully advocate for this? I think there’s something, like I work at AI2, and AI2 has budgets of order of a hundred million dollars and can train decent models. But if I wanted to redo an AI2, like my method for getting that type of money, it’s mostly gonna be like befriending a billionaire. And it seems like philanthropy dice roll in the near term is a way to get it. But then, like, maybe it really is some long slog of a multi-industrial consortium that takes a couple years off the ground and slowly, like, Google’s, or all these Netflix and all these five hundred billion dollar smaller companies are gonna give millions of dollars to have somebody else do it because they can’t get the billion dollars themselves, but they know they need to have it existed.
00:11:31 Dean Ball: And sovereign wealth funds. Right. Sovereign wealth funds everywhere can do that, right? There’s trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth. There’s pension funds, public employee pension funds. A lot of people can chip into this and it’s possible. This is like, Yann LeCun thinks this is the inevitable outcome. He thinks that the future is gonna be that some sort of global consortium gets together and builds this, because no one country is gonna be able to own it, because it’s gonna be too important. I’ve always kinda doubted that, and I’ve always thought that that outcome is probably a bad outcome for the world, honestly.
00:12:06 Nathan Lambert: That’s a bad outcome for how good the AI is.
00:12:09 Dean Ball: That’s correct. It’s a socialist outcome, you know? It’s not communism, but it is democratic socialism, and I’m not a democratic socialist, so I’m not a super big fan of that. But at the same time, I have to be honest that I kinda think that this probably does increase the odds of that precise outcome coming to bear.
00:12:33 Nathan Lambert: I think something that comes sooner is that a lot of these super wealthy countries are gonna realize they can have real... Like, they can do some sort of sovereign AI and make some sort of noise, particularly starting with open models. I think there’s the Institute for Foundation Models, which is based on the UAE university system. Like, that’s--
00:12:53 Dean Ball: That’s very UAE-coded, yeah.
00:12:55 Nathan Lambert: They’ve been playing that for years, and they can keep doing this. Their models are gonna be pretty good, and I think there’s gonna be more people that do this. There’s the SWISS initiative in EU, which is on one hand doing a good job, on the other hand plagued by the most obvious European limitations of talent cycling and consortium life. I think these things are gonna become more of a thing in the next year, but I don’t know exactly how they impact the... They don’t impact the frontier of AI, but maybe they’re just like how the geopolitics and power of AI evolves. And I for some reason feel like open models need to be the thing that they’re gonna do because if they have a closed model that’s not as good, it doesn’t really give them any sort of power. But I don’t have a good enough world view for what that actually does, and if there’s more EU models, if India actually has their act together and trains a solid model. I don’t know what that does, but I feel like it’s probably gonna happen.
00:13:54 Dean Ball: Yeah. I mean, it’s really super interesting ‘cause I think the other thing-- that will be inherently... I mean, it will be a Linux compared to a macOS, you know? It will not be as good of an experience for people. But then it becomes strange. Like, I don’t think macOS is as appealing of a thing if it’s viewed to be owned by the US government, right? And in fact, part of the reason I think that Apple is able to make its case quite credibly to consumers and businesses is they have resisted US government pressure to turn things over before. People might remember about a decade ago, there was this shooter in San Bernardino, California, and the FBI tried to force Apple to release iPhone data, and Apple said, “No, we’re not gonna expose this information.” Now, I think the FBI eventually just hacked it anyway, but that’s a separate issue. It’s a matter of principle here.
00:15:01 Dean Ball: So yeah, I think it’s an interesting question: do we expect for the gap between the open frontier and the American closed frontier to widen in the near future, especially just because of how much compute they’re gonna have?
00:15:30 Nathan Lambert: A hundred percent. And data and talent. Like, a hundred percent. It’s happening.
00:15:34 Dean Ball: Data, talent. And it’s compounding, right? I mean, this has always been my view. And how much, I’m not sure, but I think it could be quite significant because these things are compounding benefits. And so if you expect them to just continue compounding, then all of a sudden it gets pretty bleak pretty quickly, would be my fear.
00:16:00 Nathan Lambert: One of the... I mean, what’s your take on this? Why has it not compounded so much faster? Like, I feel like these three companies are spending, I don’t know, 10X what the Chinese labs are spending, and you only get like a little bit better model. Like, I believed so full-heartedly that Claude and ChatGPT and all these models are much better, and I expect them to become better by increasing margin, but it’s still confusing why they’re not already more ahead.
00:16:29 Dean Ball: I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I think they are that ahead, and it’s just difficult to show up in benchmarks for the obvious reasons that benchmarks get chased. And like, I do feel that with the coding agents and with certain use cases, I do just feel like, wow, the American frontier is just way ahead, profoundly ahead of the Chinese frontier there. But there’s a lot of other things where you do kinda saturate how good you can be. I suspect that a very large fraction of AI usage is essentially glorified Google search. Even though I don’t think AI is glorified Google search, I suspect that a lot of what people use it for is that, at the consumer level. And it isn’t obvious to me how much better you can get at things like that. But my guess would be that over the next five years, I would guess the American labs really take off, in part because of compute, data, internal deployments for recursive self-improvement style stuff. And also, it’s amazing how we talk about that as just a normal thing now.
00:18:05 Nathan Lambert: I think there will be a ceiling on it. Like, they’re gonna get a ton of improvement-- The gains are insane. It’s like, personally, at my job, I’ve been a lot of a research manager and just chasing shit down to get a model out the door. But now I can take on hard engineering tasks because I’m like, “Okay, might as well do this at the same time.” Like, going from zero to a hundred software engineers at anyone’s fingertips is worth a lot in terms of exploration. But the next, like, from a hundred to ten thousand is like, people can mess that up type thing. But that’s a huge gain.
00:18:37 Dean Ball: I kind of agree. I think there’ll be a sigmoid there too. But then the other thing that will happen is, like, what I sort of wonder is will the AI companies, will the current model vendors, will they eventually become more like true infrastructure companies where what they actually do is they have models that design their own chips and models that design their own data centers and models that design their own successors. And so it’s this hugely vertically integrated thing, and what you’re really getting access to is not just the model itself, but you’re getting access to this highly optimized hardware, physical world infrastructure. And again, that’s kind of already the case, but does that become even more the case? And then that’s truly insurmountable for any open player. That’s definitionally insurmountable for an open player, and that becomes scary too. But again, this is why I’ve always felt so good about the position of the US closed source labs. This is why I’ve always been pretty bullish on them and have my concerns about open.
00:20:07 Dean Ball: But to the extent the US government makes it impossible to trust closed source models, you do provide an advantage to open there. You’re giving a shot in the arm. If you like open source, you should hope that the supply chain risk designation against Anthropic is quite broad.
00:20:09 Nathan Lambert: It’s a rough thing to hope for.
00:20:09 Dean Ball: I mean, you shouldn’t actually hope for it, but I just mean, like, if that’s the only thing you care about in the world is open source, then--
00:20:17 Nathan Lambert: I would say that anyone that only cares about open source probably is not thinking through any of these principles. It just gets really bad if you only have-- Like, AI is not gonna be meaningful lift to the economy and nor sustainable if everything is open. Like, if models are truly commoditized, things look kind of rough out there.
00:20:36 Dean Ball: I think a world where models get commoditized is a really bleak world too, actually. And yeah, this is why I’m very worried about what the US government is doing. But I think that it helps on the margin, though. It probably helps on the margin in terms of waking people up. That still is my view.
00:20:55 Nathan Lambert: I am a little surprised by the Qwen stuff, but I think there’s-- It’s like, at some point, I knew there was gonna be a year where a lot of the open model efforts just died because they’re just too expensive and too similar. But at the same time, having a lot of efforts that are somewhat similar but exploring a lot of the minor permutations in modeling space to figure out what works for people who use open models is actually quite good. I’m very bearish on the reflection style approach, which is build a lab, build an incredible model, drop it, make a bank selling it on-prem. Because on-prem is not that distinct from a business model as having a closed model. You could sell a closed model on-prem with the right IP controls. But then the person who actually wins open is by trying a whole bunch of tiny different things, understanding what is actually a meaningful differentiator in private data, in certain deployments and whatever, and then really iterating on that with a community. And that’s why I was like, Qwen is the closest to doing this by being so close to the community, and it’s so distinct from what a lot of the other labs are betting on.
00:22:05 Nathan Lambert: But I see the pressure going away and kind of reducing diversity onto standards, because standards also make inference more efficient. Using open models is really rough. I think some of the best open models have really had rough launches. I think GPT-OSS had a horrible launch in terms of usability and is now one of the most popular models of all time. Qwen 3.5, it’s like researchers I work with are like, “Oh, let’s see if we can do some basic RL baselines on it,” and all the software stack is kinda broken. It takes a few weeks to get it going. And this is ‘cause all the models change differently, and closed labs just have such an advantage there ‘cause they should conceivably ship things on day one that work. I mean, don’t talk about Claude’s runtime, but that’s fine.
00:22:42 Dean Ball: And don’t talk about the GPT-5 auto router either. But yeah, no, totally. I think that’s right.
00:22:53 Dean Ball: I think fullness of time, I’m bullish on open source in the long run, fairly bearish in the next five years. The next five years are gonna matter quite a bit. And there is a lot of cope in both open source world and also... I don’t really hear it so much in open source world. I think open source world is actually more honest about this. But where the cope is so bad is in global civil society discourse. Like, I was in India for the AI Impact Summit recently, and they are just smoking the copium, being like, “We are gonna do everything on subfrontier open source models, and we’re just gonna diffuse those, and that’s all we’re gonna need in our economy.” And I just think that’s, if you’re India, that’s really not the bet you wanna make. I understand these are resource-constrained countries. They have a lot of acute constraints that they face, but nonetheless, I think that’s probably not a good bet.
00:24:05 Nathan Lambert: Well, it’s even if those long tail models will work like manufacturing has worked, where it’s like Apple has put hundreds of billions of dollars into the manufacturing ecosystem in China to get absolute fine margins and scale. Like, if you really-- these things are gonna be used so much that that fine margin is actually gonna matter a lot, and it is not cheap to get that fine margin. You can’t just YOLO a DeepSeek V3 and spend five million dollars in compute and be done. It’s still gonna be expensive for a long time.
00:24:34 Dean Ball: Yeah, it requires-- I think the Chinese approach, in the long run, if China’s gonna continue its strategy and they want to be competitive with the American frontier, they’re gonna have to fully socialize that, I think. I don’t think DeepSeek alone is gonna be able to do this, and I don’t think even Alibaba alone is gonna be able to do this. I think they’re going to need some sort of collective effort. Especially because of the export controls, the American export controls. They’re gonna have to centralize compute. They’re gonna have to centralize all these things, and talent and data and all that.
00:25:17 Nathan Lambert: I don’t see it happening. Like, maybe someone gets officially AGI pilled, and I don’t know that much about China. But the things I know about China, it seems like that would be a big lift, and it would take a lot of time to actually do it. Like, all the companies would have to give up their biggest... All the cloud companies are like tech companies making a lot of money. They would be like, “We have to give up what?”
00:25:42 Dean Ball: No, it would be a tough sell. Obviously, if the Chinese government decides they want to do it, they absolutely will. But in total, it will be a tough sell. My experience having had diplomatic engagements of many sorts with Chinese government-- and a lot of Chinese tech policy is actually not directly set by the government. It’s actually more kind of civil society, academia and civil society adjacent to government. Had a lot of conversations with folks like that, and they’re definitely... It’s largely not a very AGI-pilled crew. I think AGI-pilled-ness probably has a rough correlation with GDP per capita, and I think China is about where you would expect based on their GDP per capita, maybe a little bit ahead, but not very so. But if they ever do get AGI pilled, that’s the kind of thing that they could consider, but then that’s still a pretty extraordinary outcome because the Chinese government would have to be willing to make these things and then give it away. And I kinda just don’t think they will.
00:27:11 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I mean, all the politics of control with how everybody thinks AI is so powerful are pointing to very value-destructive actions economically in order to achieve the end state that people determine to be right. It’s like supporting open source to the extent that you can to avoid situations like Anthropic being labeled a supply chain risk and having interactions like that totally decimating runway of AI productivity. Like, if the companies are really gonna commit to open source for other things, then they’re gonna lose money. And I see this in-- China’s economy would be taking a gigantic hit doing this. And that’s kind of a common theme of what we’re talking about is that the interface of AI in an economic fashion is gonna make the next few years really weird.
00:28:06 Dean Ball: I hope so.
00:28:09 Nathan Lambert: I think things are gonna be weird, but I haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about how that interacts with political institutions. I thought about socially weird a lot, but I haven’t thought about power weird a lot.
00:28:20 Dean Ball: Oh, power weird is what I worry about all the time. What I worry about the most is I think it’s plausible that what we’re seeing... I’ve always had this concern. I have this dual problem of-- maybe I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth. Maybe that’s just the critique, and it’s a fair critique. But I routinely complain about how people in government aren’t really... They pretend to take AI seriously, but they don’t take it that seriously. And they don’t really own the implications of advanced, of near term advanced AI and all that. I think we basically have transformative AI right now, but they don’t own that, because it’s annoying, it’s difficult, it’s conceptually challenging.
00:29:08 Dean Ball: But the flip side of that is that if people do start to take it very seriously, there’s the risk that they sort of lash out, that they get scared, and they lash out and do things that are rash, in a rush. And that actually creates very, very bad, much worse outcomes than you otherwise might have gotten. I think that’s a very fair risk, and I think it’s possible that you might see things like that happen within the U.S. I don’t think this particular incident with Anthropic is quite an example of that. But it’s possible that you do see that in the coming years, and that is in and of itself a pretty scary outcome because if the U.S. government decides that they want to nationalize the frontier labs, I think it could be one of the most tyrannical things we ever see happen in this country.
00:30:16 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know how to reply to this. I think things are... It’s serious times and I see so many... It feels like such a Sisyphean task to make more open models exist, but all the broader trends seem to point to that being a more stable equilibrium in a lot of ways. Like, good enough open models and keeping up with what we all feel happening in the closed model land.
00:30:50 Nathan Lambert: So I don’t know. I stay motivated, but I feel increasingly lost in terms of achieving it.
00:30:56 Dean Ball: I don’t think you should be. I think, look, I suspect the US government will not actually do it, and the best thing about America is that our general sort of-- I don’t wanna say incompetence, but the general sort of chaos of American institutions and decentralized confusingness of it all, it can often be quite frustrating, and it can sometimes be a detriment, but it can also be really great because we tend to not execute and follow through on our very worst ideas. And so I don’t think we’re going to do that. It doesn’t feel very American to do it. I worry about it because I worry about these rash reactions, and that’s why I fight as heavily as I do on things like this, despite not insignificant cost to me to do it, politically speaking. But that’s totally worth it because I care about this. I think everything, I think that will probably be fine. But yeah, I do agree. It’s a major risk. It’s a major risk, and it’s a weird world to think about, I’ll tell you that much.
00:32:16 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I don’t have a lot more to add. I’m sure we’ll continue this discussion. I think it warrants the space of it ‘cause that’s the... It’s one of the longer term things, but it’s not in the news cycle whatsoever, at least the open model angle. There’s just so many layers. People have to talk. Like, send feedback, people listening. I’ll even send this out as a podcast as well and just like, what do people think? How do we get to the places we want to get to?
00:32:46 Dean Ball: Well, one thing I’m particularly interested in is-- one of the items in the Trump administration action plan, which I worked on for those who don’t have that context, is this idea of financializing compute, creating a financial market, like basically a commodities market for compute so that you can buy, you know, like really robust. In the same way that you can buy electricity spot, electricity futures and electricity on the spot market and things like this, the wholesale. Could you do something like that for compute? That could really profoundly change the dynamics and the economics of AI production. It’s not gonna turn them over. It doesn’t flip them on their head, but it changes it quite meaningfully. And I’m very excited by that prospect.
00:33:48 Dean Ball: And that’s the kind of thing that I would be increasingly doing if this sort of interference of government into the frontier continues. What I suspect I’ll do is start developing some of those ideas which I developed earlier. I’m only one person. If those things start to seem relevant again, I totally will. Because anything to make it easier to produce AI for people that don’t have trillions of dollars will be extremely important.
00:34:38 Nathan Lambert: Yeah. I think that... I don’t know. I’m happy to leave it there.
00:34:43 Dean Ball: Cool.
00:34:45 Nathan Lambert: I can let you get on your trip. It’s good to catch up. I’m early in the process of potentially coming to DC in a few months, so I will let you know if I do.
00:34:52 Dean Ball: Oh, please do. It’d be great to see you. We can record an episode of my podcast live.
00:34:58 Nathan Lambert: Sounds good. Okay. Thanks everybody for listening.