Ben Horowitz: The Fight Over Open Source AI
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If you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. So the Internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, like, by our luck. The safest thing for the world is that there's not one AI to rule them all, that there's AI for everybody. And I think that open source is basically the best path towards that goal. It's probably the single most important policy issue around AI. It feels like we're at a stable equilibrium in the market, but the truth is the AI market is probably less than 3% penetrated.
Should AI be open? Theo Jaffe and Sofia Puccini are joined by Ben Horowitz to discuss the battle over open source AI, why he believes open models are essential to innovation and national security, and what the future of AI competition means for startups, Frontier Labs, and the broader technology ecosystem.
We are live with Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, who needs no introduction. So we'll just dive right into it. Ben, welcome back to MTS.
Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here.
So so much has happened in the world of open source, open weights in the last couple of weeks. It's gotten, you know, it's gotten real. There's there's some drama going on. There's an open letter released by NVIDIA today called Open Weights in American AI Leadership signed by many companies, including Andreessen Horowitz. So can you tell us a little bit about the intent behind this letter and what you hope to achieve from it?
Yeah. So I think that it's probably the single most important policy issue around AI that's kind of currently going on. And the kind of battle is between almost an anti competitive stance, in a safety cloak, is what we ought to be doing. And so if you look at why is open source important, then there's many reasons. The first will just start academia. Academia is completely out of the AI game if they're still open source. So that goes away. I think secondly, we just had a really interesting security incident with OpenAI hacking into Hugging Face. And the only way Hugging Face was able to preven
Right. So Jensen made a Twitter account basically to publish Good
for Jensen.
So that I think speaks to the significance of where we are right now, that he was like, okay, now is the time to speak out about this and get all of these companies to co sign it. What do you think are some of the risks right now from a government action perspective on open source?
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