The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Big Tech Unites for Open Source AI—and Against Anthropic

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, a big tech coalition throws its weight behind open weights models. And before that, in the headlines, Nvidia also throws its weight behind Ilius suits gavers safe superintelligence. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, robots and pencils, blitzie, and airtable. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to Patreon.com. Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Starting point is 00:00:35 To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIdailybrief. And if you want to not just hear about the news and discussions in AI, but actually dig in and learn AI, come check out our summer adventure. It is the latest free, self-directed project-based AIDB learning experience, built in conjunction with super intelligent and our superstar New Fargaspar, and is a choose-your-own adventure for you to do everything in AI from build a personal context file to actually build an agentic operating system, from doing really simple stuff that can still be incredibly impactful, all the way to doing advanced agendic loops. Again, you can find that for free at summeradventure.a.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Come join more than a thousand friends on this AI summer adventure. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with Nvidia making a substantial investment in safe super intelligence, the enigmatic startup from former OpenAI chief scientist, Ilya Sutskhaver. Now, that's a name that hasn't come up on this show, at least very much, in years. Going back a bit for those who haven't been here for as long, Ilya was one of the central figures in the Open AI leadership dispute in late 2003.

Starting point is 00:01:40 First, he was a major driver into posing Sam, then he came back on board with Sam coming back to the CEO role. It was all very confused. When the dust had settled, he ended up leaving the company, along with CTO Miramaradi, both spinning off to found their own AI labs. As that was happening, the safe bet was on Ilya building something interesting and novel in the space. He was the scientist with the decades-long history in AI, completing his PhD under Jeffrey Hinton

Starting point is 00:02:01 and pioneering the early work at OpenAI. Meanwhile, some investors openly scoffed during Marotti's fundraising campaign, and yet, almost two years later, Maradi's Thinking Machines Lab has hired an all-star team of AI researchers, and is at the center of this new trend of helping companies think about fine-tuning their own models. All of that happening while we haven't heard anything about what safe superintelligence is up to. But then again, the actual mission statement of the company implied secrecy from the start. While thinking machines had a practical goal of building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals, that's their phrase. SSI's goal was much more narrow, with Ilya proposing a straight shot research organization to produce safe superintelligence.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Indeed, what has been clear from the beginning with SSI is that Ilya was taking the position that the whole game is superintelligence, and that anything that you have to do for short-term commercial purposes on the way to superintelligence is ultimately just a destroy. So while, yes, other companies have raced off $2 trillion dollar valuations in the private markets, based on billions in enterprise sales, Ilya's bet is that that is actually potentially a distraction from what is the ultimate mission, or at least what his ultimate mission is. Now, the actual news of this new deal between Nvidia and SSI is very brief. In a joint press release, Nvidia said that they had made a substantial investment in safe superintelligence without giving a number.

Starting point is 00:03:20 The release also stated that SSI would receive access to Nvidia's next generation Vera Rubin chips. SSI said that the deal would 10x their compute resources over the next 12 months. In the background, sources said that SSI had previously been relying on Google's TPUs, and NVIDIA said that they made the investment after gaining rare access to SSI's technology. Jensen Huang commented, Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI. We're excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover, powered by our Vera Rubin platform. Now, SSI still looms very large in the space, and the announcement suggests the company is making progress.

Starting point is 00:03:53 SSI commented, we reached the point where our research is worth scaling, and with this partnership, we will be able to. Ilya himself chimed in, adding time to scale that SSI. SSI co-founder Daniel Levy added, Deep learning happens when a small, cracked team operates a big computer. The computer just got bigger. Now, one other Nvidia story, following up from the news that they were going to backstop an open AI facility, the circular AI financing narrative is back with a vengeance.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Invidia stock was down 4% on Monday, as people pointed to a new news. three-quarters of a trillion dollars in deals that are for some just a little too circular for their tastes. The two deals include a partnership with SK Group, which will see the companies doing more than $500 billion in business with each other, as well as that $250 backstopping deal to help OpenAI construct a new data center. Indeed, we even got an update of that circular deal chart that was flying around all of late last year, so expect to see that little chestnut come back over the coming weeks. Still, when it comes to chips, Nvidia remains in a class of its own, and that is perhaps why China is working so hard to change the equation. The Wall Street Journal reported that

Starting point is 00:04:57 CCP operatives are pushing the adoption of domestic Chinese technology. Last summer, Huawei held a closed-door meeting to give a demo of their latest generation of chips, showing apparently dramatic progress in catching up to Nvidia. That was enough to give the party the confidence to get more aggressive. According to the Wall Street Journal, China's AIs are, quote, delivered a blunt warning to China's largest AI users. Anyone who resisted employing domestic chips was a traitor. Now, the shift has been fairly dramatic. In 2021, prior to U.S. export controls, China was 90% dependent on U.S. chips. By 2025, that number fell to 60%.

Starting point is 00:05:30 And Morgan Stanley believes it could fall to as low as 25% over the next five years. Huawei Deputy Chairman Eric Shu was very clear on the cause, commenting, if the U.S. hadn't forced our country, our company, and our industry into a corner, we never would have done something like this. Now, to be clear, even though they've made progress, Huawei chips are still lagging significantly behind Nvidia. And that's primarily because progress has only accelerated in the West as well. Kyle Chan, a fellow at Brookings, said it's like trying to catch up with a bullet train.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Even with China's tech ecosystem focused on the problem, it's still a daunting challenge. And one of the biggest issues is simply throughput. China has been denied access to chip fabs made by ASML, the monopoly supplier for Taiwan in the West and the only company able to manufacture cutting-edge fabs. China's entire supply chain can produce around 28,000 advanced logic chips per month currently, a fraction of the output of TSM. Still, that number is forecast to double each year for the next three years, according to Bernstein. Huawei alone expects to ship 1.5 million AI chips this year, roughly double their total for 2025.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Still, Bernstein expects that in the chip race, China will continue to lag behind the U.S. through at least 2030. The technological catch-up is happening quickly as well. On Monday, the information reported that a Shanghai-based company has begun mass-producing deep ultraviolet lithography machines, a key component in advanced fabs. This is the first time that China has had access to this technology that was previously kept from them under those export controls. Overall, all of this reporting highlights the extent to which China's technology base has been mobilized around this idea. Throughout the export control debates over recent years, there have broadly been two camps. Those who think the U.S. interest is best served by restricting China's access to chips in hopes of slowing down their progress on AI models, and those who believe that a better strategy would be to flood the country with

Starting point is 00:07:06 NVIDIA chips, owning the tech stack and keeping China dependent on the U.S. supply. It's clear now that that ship has sailed. China is developing their own chip economy, and they're doing so at a very rapid pace. Apple, meanwhile, is duking it out with Micron in a lobbying battle for Chinese Last month, reports stated that Apple was lobbying the White House for approval to purchase memory chips from Chinese manufacturers, including CXMT. Their argument was that memory prices were completely out of control, and unless the administration wanted to see $5,000 iPhones, a solution needed to be found. Now, the Wall Street General reports that U.S. memory maker Micron has waited into the debate, lobbying the White House to keep restrictions in place.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Micron is the only sizable U.S. manufacturer of memory, with the rest of the large producers headquartered in Korea. Sanjay Manrocha has reportedly warned that allowing Chinese manufacturers to enter the U.S. could decimate the local industry, courting the same fate as the U.S. steel and manufacturing industry. Now, technically, Apple doesn't need White House approval to access Chinese chips. The only restriction at the moment is the Pentagon entity list, which only limits the military supply chain. Then again, Apple does not want to go around the White House during this highly tense moment. Still, the journal notes the conundrum for the trumpetmen. They are currently facing down a rising inflation problem with the spike in memory prices hurting on the margins.

Starting point is 00:08:15 The administration has also made it a clear priority to support and promote local chipmaking, allowing Chinese chips for the ubiquitous iPhone could undermine that agenda. Micron's solution is further assistance to fast-track the construction of more domestic chip fabs. And beyond that, both Apple and Micron have worked hard to get in the president's good graces. A White House spokesperson shed no light on the situation, stating that the administration would pursue, quote, investments and economic relief for the American people while safeguarding our national security. Still, during a congressional hearing last week, White House Director of Science and Technology, Michael Cratios, told lawmakers, the most important thing is we have to build capacity here.

Starting point is 00:08:48 We obviously don't want to be doing business with anyone that's on the entity list. Evan Kurtzl thinks this is just the way of the world for the foreseeable future, writing, Apple wants CXMT parts in its supply chain, and Micron is lobbying to keep them out, and both are dressing it up as national security. Chip policy for the next few years is going to be mostly this, American companies fighting each other in Washington oversourcing with the geopolitics attached afterward. There was a big fight in some related parts of the world, so with that we will close the headlines and move on into our main episode.

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Starting point is 00:12:50 With 62 million views on his first. first post ever on Twitter slash X. Invita's CEO Jensen Huang's open letter about why open models matter clearly shows just how significant this conversation is getting. Take me a step back, though. Let's try to map how we got here for anyone who hasn't been paying insanely, perhaps terminally close attention as some of us have. In Washington, the concern over Chinese models has been building for months. The release of GLM 5.2, which of course happened while Fable 5 was offline, came with some dramatic headlines claiming the model was just as powerful as mythos. Take this gem from that vaunted institution of journalistic integrity, Forbes. Buckle up, the bad guys now have a model as powerful as mythos. Far be it for me to speak

Starting point is 00:13:33 ill of another AI podcast host, but if I ever drop a headline like that, I hope that you will unsubscribe as soon as humanly possible. In any case, while GLM5.2 clearly wasn't as powerful as mythos for anyone who actually used the model, it was good enough for policy makers in Washington. Shortly afterwards, we got the first rumblings that the Trump administration was considering a new executive order that would ban open source models, at least of the Chinese variety. Then, of course, we had the release of Kimmy K3, and it certainly made these concerns seem more justified. K3 was the largest open source model ever released, weighing in at 2.8 trillion parameters. It beat Fable on Arena's front-end code arena by a fairly wide margin. And of course, while that also

Starting point is 00:14:15 doesn't mean it's anywhere close to Fable across the board, this sort of thing was enough for non-technical policymakers in Washington to move from quietly concerned. to a full-on freak out. We got public comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and senior tech official Michael Cratio's foreshadowing a ban on open-source Chinese models. Now, importantly, these comments did not discuss raw model performance. Instead, officials said the policy was intended to stop model distillation and could see sanctions apply to Chinese companies known to have accessed Nvidia chips. A canonical example of this sort of rhetoric came from Treasury Secretary Scott Besant who tweeted, we support open source AI and the innovation it unlocked.

Starting point is 00:14:52 but open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC firms conduct covert industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and entity list designations will be on the table. And it wasn't just from the White House. In Congress, we began to see a flurry of bills being put forward and complaints that the administration wasn't doing enough to combat Chinese AI. With all of this flying around, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik emerged as the sole administration officials seemingly still advocating for competition as the

Starting point is 00:15:22 right way to deal with Chinese AI. He was rumored to be pushing for the administration to support U.S. open source and was reportedly taking meetings with multiple labs in recent weeks. And late last week, his agenda got a major shot in the arm when it was revealed that Kimmy K-3 lagged significantly behind mythos on crucial cybersecurity benchmarks. Now, as all this was happening, we saw some lightweight pushback from the industry when a trade group called the Little Tech Association urged the administration not to ban Chinese open source. The group which represents a part of the startup community argued that a lot of work in the field was building on top of Chinese models, and we could see a mass extinction event for U.S. startups if they were banned. The most prominent member of the group was

Starting point is 00:16:00 Y Combinator, but as vaunted as Y Combinator is among startup founders, it seemed pretty clear that this group lacked the political heft, let's say, to block a policy with major geopolitical implications. Then on Friday, Big Tech joined the fight with a widely supported open letter. The letter opened by discussing the history of open source and how free and open software now underpins every critical system in the world. In the 1980s, it began, early open-source software pioneers challenged the prevailing belief that software would advance only if companies kept tight control over their code. Open source did more than lower the cost of software. It created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty.

Starting point is 00:16:40 Continuing the letter argues, the United States now faces a similar choice with artificial intelligence. Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector. This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country. It requires expanding access to AI, encouraging competition, robust application layers, and giving Americans greater control over the technology they rely on. Openweight models, AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure are an important part of that foundation because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available. Now from there, the letter runs through the benefits of

Starting point is 00:17:19 open weight models, noting that they allow diffusion of control across the industry, increased competition, and broad distribution of AI to all consumers. It also does discuss the risks, primarily the risk of making a powerful AI available to cyber hackers. The letter commented, however, the right response to this risk is not to prohibit open weights. In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats. Open models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be to be discovered and remediated across many teams. In fact, the letter stated,

Starting point is 00:17:53 openness could be a major contributor to AI safety by ensuring there is no single point of failure in the ecosystem. Taking a perhaps controversial position, the letter sought to distinguish between model distillation and actual IP theft. It stated, Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies. A tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract values from closed models raise legitimate concerns.

Starting point is 00:18:27 Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks, rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation. The letter concludes, The Age of AI can be one of prosperity. With the right choices, open-weight AI can expand opportunity, strengthen competition, extend American technological leadership, mitigate risk, and ensure the benefits of this extraordinary technology are shared broadly, across our economy. That future is worth building and the United States should lead in building it.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Now, what made this letter more than just some random open words was the support that it quickly garnered. As I mentioned at the top of this show, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang led the way using his first ever ex post to share the letter. Huang added, AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country, open models, strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. One by one, the leaders of big tech came on board to co-sign the letter. Sundar Pichai retweeted Jensen, adding, Very happy to support this on behalf of Google. We have long benefited from open source,

Starting point is 00:19:30 our big contributors to open source, and in fact have consistently made open weights models with Gemma available from Google DeepMind. Sotcha Nadella signaled Microsoft support posting, Openweight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem. Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity while protecting national security. Mark Zuckerberg shared Nadella's post, commenting, open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this.

Starting point is 00:20:00 Elon Musk later retweeted Jensen and said, This has my full support. Jensen is right. Basically, the letter enjoyed support from dozens of companies across both big and little tech, all with a vested interest in making sure open source isn't shut down by the government. Palantir had an interesting perspective, commenting, 20 years ago, Palantir was a new entrant. Today, we stand with some of tech's biggest and emergent players

Starting point is 00:20:21 to reject a future where a select few closed frontier models rule them all. Sovereignty and prosperity require American leadership in a strong open-weight AI ecosystem that strengthens competition, keeps customers in control, and drives the benefit of ingenuity across the economy. And honestly, one strand of the discourse was just gushing and excited, Not Boring's Paki McCormick wrote, capitalism is just so beautiful, $8 trillion worth of market cap coming out in support of open-weight models

Starting point is 00:20:47 because it's good for their business and makes them look good and totally coincidentally, also happens to be better for us consumers and practically every business except for a couple of labs. We just get that benefit for free with Microsoft and Nvidia's self-interest. It brings a tear to the eye. Arvon Shrinivas wrote, Today is the most positive I have felt about the future of American AI,

Starting point is 00:21:07 the coming together of so many companies in a united manner to fight against regulatory capture is incredible to watch. Tech commentator growing Daniel posted, honestly, this is bigger than anything else going on today. Opus 5 doing arc puzzles is nothing compared to this. Added Box CEO, Aaron Levy, not sure if anything in tech has ever gotten as much broad-based support and alignment as this posted message.

Starting point is 00:21:27 The key now is that America should actually step up and continue to push OpenWeets innovation. It's good for the entire market, including the frontier labs. Open weights accelerates the diffusion of AI across the economy by providing more options for specific customer requirements, can lower the cost of certain workloads, and you can tune models for areas of work that don't always make sense in a horizontal frontier model.

Starting point is 00:21:47 Hell Denny's even supported the message, sharing a Venn diagram, with the overlapping space between them and NVIDIA being about knowing the importance of staying open. Now, the notable absence was, of course, the frontier U.S. labs, open AI, and anthropic. At least initially, it didn't take long before Sam Altman responded to the letter,

Starting point is 00:22:05 commenting, I want the U.S. to win an AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this. At the time, OpenAI was not a signatory to the letter, but after receiving a ton of pushback, they were in fact added to the list of signatories. And that left one. Former AIsar, David Sacks, wrote, The entire tech industry, save for Anthropic, has come out in favor of open source AI. So what happens next? Will Anthropic change its lobbying efforts? Not likely. Now the gaslighting begins. Nobody is trying to ban open source. We just want to limit who can use it. We just want to limit who can contribute to it. We just want to limit how powerful these models can be. We just want to make sure the guardrails we lobbied for can't be removed. The net effect will

Starting point is 00:22:42 be the same. They won't stop until they kneecap open source. The rest of the industry needs to watch these guys like a hawk. Now, because of travel, I'm recording this on Monday afternoon, it's entirely possible that Anthropic has shifted by the time you're hearing this, but my guess is that that's not going to happen. And frankly, the fact that they don't support this shouldn't be surprising, given Anthropics' views. They've openly said they are working with the government to prevent distillation attacks, so most assume Anthropic is lobbying for an open model ban behind closed doors. Hold aside at any lobbying that's going on, CEO Dario Amadei has spoken repeatedly about the risks posed by open models in general and Chinese models in particular.

Starting point is 00:23:16 During an interview with Bloomberg in June, Amade said, What I worry about is if we get Mythos-class cyber abilities available for anyone to download. I think it's a serious concern. So how to make sense of all of this? Well, one interpretation, which kind of harkens back to what Paki was saying, is that this is just everyone talking their book, man. Bucco Capital writes, my read on this is quite simple. Objectively, open AI and Anthropic are kicking everyone's butts. You can see the revenue ramps. In fact, the open letter makes me think they are doing even better than I thought, and everyone else is genuinely really scared. The potential losers see an opening,

Starting point is 00:23:51 or alternatively worse, see the door closing, and they feel compelled to act now. Geopolitics and morality and nationalism are mostly just noise. I don't think corporations really care about that stuff. Not really, but they really care about losing, and they are losing. Silicon Data head of research, Steve Howe, re-shared that post from Bucco and added, Interesting take. The question is, which side of the open versus closed models debate is invoking the geopolitical moral and nationalistic arguments, though? To the extent that the best open models are predominantly Chinese, it seems that the support of open models runs counter to the geopolitical and nationalistic concerns. More broadly, I think it's possible that

Starting point is 00:24:25 OpenAI and Anthropic could be running away with it on the easier and better U.S., hence adoption that AI has become their game to lose. My other interpretation of the Open Letter is that rather than being scared of the raw competitive powers of Open AI and Anthropic, corporate leaders and signatories of the letter are worried about the power of the U.S. federal government and a ban of Chinese open models on non-economic geopolitical and Natset grounds, thereby reinforcing, if not cementing, the market dominance of the two labs before U.S. Native Open Models have a chance to sprout up. Now, perhaps reinforcing the idea that Open AI wasn't just pressured by public opinion to join

Starting point is 00:24:56 this, but that it does intersect with their actual beliefs, in a recent in podcast appearance, Sam Altman said, I think the fight of the current moment is, are we going to head to a world of AI authoritarianism or liberty? Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it's been a long-term net loss. We are going to put this in the hands of people. We're going to empower them.

Starting point is 00:25:13 We're going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want. Business Insider took from that conversation, the idea that one of Altman's big fears is a small number of companies controlling AI. And indeed, for some open advocates, it was just a big moment to feel all the feels. Nathan Lambert wrote,

Starting point is 00:25:30 A big day for open models. I feel like I can relax a little, soak it in. An incredibly powerful coalition said, We believe, we care. That's rare on any topic. Mudith Jaya Sakara writes, I really hope that in six months, when there is, yes, another cyclical swing towards closed source,

Starting point is 00:25:45 we all remember the energy and values that are currently in the discourse. It's very easy to rally around open source when the line between the two frontiers is this blurry. But the reason we've rallied behind this thesis for so long is that in order to build this safe and democratized future of intelligence, it should be shaped by many, red-teamed and interpreted by many, and served by many. Yes, I really do believe the safest and most fruitful world with the fused AI is the one contributed to by more of the brilliant people in our field than the ones just behind closed doors. Now, when it comes to where this leaves Anthropic,

Starting point is 00:26:14 boy, is this another Rorschach test. Depending on your perspective, they are either the villa or the main recipient of aura from this whole affair. AI commentator Andrew Curran re-shared David Sacks post and said, The crusade against the House of Anthropic continues to build. It is increasingly framed as Anthropics standing alone against the entire industry. And for some, even if they didn't agree, said that it was pretty cool that Anthropic was sticking to its guns. Pachy McCormick again wrote,

Starting point is 00:26:39 I will say it would have been easy for Anthropic to just sign the letter and then lobby behind the scenes and I respect that they didn't. They believe something and they're sticking to it even when costly. Sedonymous AI entrepreneur and commentator signal thinks that the diversity of perspective is a good thing. For what it's worth, they wrote, I love that Anthropic has a different worldview than many of the other companies. Why wouldn't we want founders with genuine principles who arrive at different conclusions about the future?

Starting point is 00:27:00 You don't have to agree with Anthropics' views to respect that they're acting consistently with what they believe. If anything, this whole episode gave them more aura because they were willing to again stand on principle. Time and time again, this has been true. A healthy ecosystem for this country is one where people with fundamentally different visions compete to prove themselves right. And signal added, One last thing, if you're a policymaker or a CEO who signed that letter, you now have to be prepared for the possibility that an open-weight model could eventually be involved in a serious security or safety incident. If that happens, Anthropics' position will look a lot more

Starting point is 00:27:30 prescient than many of its critics are willing to admit today. But that's the nature of taking a principled stance. Sometimes you're wrong. But if events validate your reasoning, history tends to remember that a lot more. One perhaps surprising entrant to the Anthropics getting aura from this side of the room came from OpenAI's Rune, who retweeted that post I just shared from Denny's and added, I don't think every corporation in capitalism banding together meekly signing petitions complaining against closed models realizes how cool they're making anthropic look, unlimited aura farming once again. Interestingly, Ethan Mollick pointed to another tweet from Rune to argue that many of the people inside labs just don't think the way the rest of us think. The tweet he pointed to from Rune was one

Starting point is 00:28:08 in which Rune said, there is no way to hold a consistent belief set where your AGI-pilled and pro open source. And this has been obvious since 2015 or whatever. enormous cope insurers. The implication, of course, is that if you are fully AGI-pilled, you are too scared of what a full AGI world looks like to want it to be open. Ethan Mollick added, I think most people, when talking about open weights models, don't deeply believe in the vision of AGI and ASI that lab insiders believe in. Like, they don't expect AI to really present grave semi-autonomous biosecurity or other similar risks. Whether it's right or not, no one knows. If you don't believe these risks are real, then you probably believe that the people in the

Starting point is 00:28:45 labs discussing them are intentionally spreading fud for purely commercial reasons and making up risks to keep their high margins via regulation. Now, I do think that for many people, anthropic standing on principle will be something to be lauded. However, to the extent that is the case, they might not want their employees to be snarky on Twitter. Member of the Anthropic technical staff, Julian Schittweiser, retweeted Jensen's post and added, I'm so excited that Jensen Huang is a believer in open source now, looking forward to the Kuda and GPU driver open source release. He then added in the same thread retweeting Satya Nadella's post, and Sotia Nadella coming out for open source too. Can't wait for the open sourcing of Windows and MS Office.

Starting point is 00:29:20 The responses to this were fairly aghast. David Sacks, of course, jumped in saying, Nobody is saying that all software has to be open source. What they're saying is that open weight AI should be allowed. By implication, they're rejecting your company's incessant machinations to kneecap the open model ecosystem. Investor Bill Gurley writes, excited to see Anthropic acknowledge the real problem with Open is it competes

Starting point is 00:29:38 with their corporate economic strategy. The quote-unquote awareness here is revealing. When you build the biggest private market cap ever, you should expect competition. I'm sure the secondaries have been nice. Matthew Berman writes, such a bad take. Belief that open source should exist doesn't equate to belief that literally everything should be open source. And Nvidia invested $20 billion into open source.

Starting point is 00:29:57 Embarrassing. Taking the other side of the aura question, A16 Z's Justine Moore writes, Imagine you're the banker writing Anthropics S1 and now have to add massive aura loss from employee tweets to the risk section. Summing it up, Jeremy Howard writes, it continues to boggle the mind how many people who otherwise seem to have a functioning intellect appear to lose all cognitive capacity

Starting point is 00:30:17 when it comes to thinking about actions that impact the company that pays them. If nothing else, it gives you a sense of just how intense this conversation is getting. If you take away anything from this, it is that there are big implications for whatever policy the U.S. government tries to pursue, whether it's neutral, pro-open source, or against open source. I will say that wherever you fall in this debate,

Starting point is 00:30:37 you are going to have a lot of room to make your opinions known because I think that for the moment, this is just about the biggest conversation that we're going to be having. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Big Tech Unites for Open Source AI—and Against Anthropic

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