The AI Cold War

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is reactions to Kimi K3.

Today’s Lineup

Author Tyler Cowen at 12:00 PM

IM8 Co-Founder Danny Yeung at 12:35 PM

a16z GP Connor Love at 12:40 PM

Natural Co-Founder & CEO Kahlil Lalji at 12:50 PM

Kalshi Co-Founder & CEO Tarek Mansour at 1:00 PM

Sunday Robotics Co-Founder & CEO Tony Zhao at 1:20 PM

Run of Show

The AI Cold War, by John Coogan

Moonshot introduced Kimi K3 last Thursday and the timeline chewed through the story over the weekend. As always, it’s over, we’re back. The headlines are impressive, but not wildly surprising based on current trendlines in model progress. It does seem to invalidate the thesis that open source would start falling behind though. In the most above board scenario, the Moonshot team is just a bunch of highly talented AI researchers who marshalled enough compute to release a great model. Open sourcing Kimi is a great way to grab attention, attract talent, and drive demand for hosted API services that are more turnkey. The more skeptical take runs along the lines of: the compute was smuggled to China against chip controls, the data was exfiltrated from frontier lab APIs routed through wrapper companies, the open source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies, and there might even be spies inside companies stealing IP directly. The reality is probably some mix of both.

There are bigger questions about AI safety in a world of powerful open-source AI. I haven’t seen a ton of takes from that crowd but it doesn’t feel like they’d be happy about it. From a cybersecurity perspective, there’s another more powerful tool in the attacker’s tool chest, but fortunately defenders have had roughly 6 months of frontier exclusivity to prepare. There’s no debating that open source AI is punk rock, it feels like Napster. There’s something deeply satisfying about the idea of a solar-powered server rack serving you up unstoppable intelligence.…