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This is a prepared statement for congress by Nathan Lambert, author of https://rlhfbook.com/ and AllenAi employee (one of the few who have shared their models as open source)
Unfortunately Nathan recently left AI2, along with some of the leadership most involved in their truly open models. https://www.geekwire.com/2026/allen-institute-for-ai-ceo-ali...
Impressive you know. They are a few months behind but still the world uses their models. Bet you because the users suspect that Americans will pull the rug from under them. Few months behind versus being left behind forever. Would have been nice to know the differences in spending between the models but I suspect the data is impossible to collect.
They are good enough and vastly cheaper. It’s not fear of the future. It’s economic reality of the present.
That’s certainly part of it. I think people underestimate the value of getting to ‘good enough’. Once that’s reached, the economics start to be more of a factor in decision making.
However, I think geopolitics has also become a factor as the very existence of this article indicates.
The world powers have only said things like "bigger and more important than the Manhattan project”.
So what gives you that idea?
DeepSeek and Qwen set a floor American open-weight models can't match without subsidy or a different cost structure, and that price/performance ratio drives adoption more than benchmarks.
It's worth noting that Chinese AI labs aren't profitable, so in some sense they're not doing it without subsidy either.
Anthropic is profitable now. They have massive debt looming over them, but they're at least making more than they spend each quarter.
https://github.com/ConsciousGroupMind/SKYNET-800---Collectiv...
Really important work here. Really glad it's being shared a) with US Leadership and b) with the community.
As an aside, it’s always funny to me that anybody outside of Europe listens to anything the Europeans say about AI. The Europeans literally have zero skin in the game. Their entire raison d’être is just to pass regulations that they then attempt to extraterritorially enforce, but they contribute almost nothing to the area of interest. It’s legit insane to me.
The contributions they make vs the amount of inconvenience they are vis-a-vis compliance with their own esoteric rules probably fit some Pareto maximum of 20% of users requiring 80% of the work for compliance. The rest of us (ie, the non-European world) should honestly just point and laugh and then move on when these people try to influence things.