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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?
It's not a suspicion, it has actually happened. US government briefly banned Fable for non-americans, and the american corporations pick and choose who has access to their unrestricted models which in practice excludes even american citizens, to say nothing of foreigners like myself.
They are literally segmenting the world into haves and have-nots, just like nuclear power. Thank god China is out there and constantly undermining them with their non-stop open weights model releases.
The best situation for us mere mortals is one where they struggle against each other endlessly without any hope of victory. The second either the US or China wins, it's pretty much over for us and unimaginable oppression will quickly follow.
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.
Zero Mistrals in the game eh
Not a fan of overregulation killing business, but Europe is definitely an important check against the surveillance powers of big tech companies in US. European regulations become a reference point for the rest of the world, especially poorer countries who dont have power to regulate US tech companies by themselves.
It's becoming more clear that for big enterprises to really adopt AI, they need to use open models. Especially if they want to own their own intelligence, which they should.
I spent the last 2 days building basic AI agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflows for a large company. Those seemingly boring workflows had bank statements, supplier IDs and other sensitive information.
For me it was all alarm bells, there is no way they can afford to give closed models access to this data. I was compelled to figure out an open model based solution for them, which made me realize that this is probably the only way for enterprises going forward.
Same here. We are at a stage where we are evaluating cost/benefit for my enterprise. I am heavily pushing for in house hardware with open models.
I've actually flipped on this the last few days because of liability.
The big labs are going to be on the hook for rogue behavior by Claude or Sol. Customers will be able to sue for damages and deflect regulators if their customer data is abused or their agents attack external services.
If you use a Chinese OSS model and it goes rogue? Yeah good luck with that, your shop is 100% on the hook.
They haven't so far.
Thank you for sharing this perspective. I agree with the conclusions outlined. However, I would have appreciated more insights into the OpenAI OSS family of models like gpt-oss.