Sriram Krishnan on Open Source AI's Biggest Week Yet
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You cannot bring it back to very business first principles. If you're providing a product of value, capitalism will find a way to make the supply chain work for you. So if you have an open rate model that is providing value, that means that every part of the stack underneath, whether it is a neo cloud, the chip provider, somebody who provides gas turbines or fire suppression, is going to orient itself to provide value. If you're providing a product of value, capitalism will take care of all the rest. If you go look at how the rest of the ecosystem is doing, the growth is pretty strong and spec
you're gonna see that continue. Open source AI is moving faster than ever, and the balance of power in the industry may be shifting. In this episode, Theo Jaffe and Sofia Puccini are joined by former White House AI policy adviser, Sriram Krishnan, to unpack what the latest wave of open models means for Frontier Labs, AI policy, pricing, cybersecurity, and America's position in the global AI race.
We are back. We are live with Shriam Krishnan who just finished his tenure as the senior White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence, previously as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and held senior roles at Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and Twitter. So, Shrum, we're so glad to have you on. Welcome to MTS.
Thank you. I've been a fan of everything you folks have been doing for the, you know, last few months and excited to be here. I think this is the first time in about two years I've been able to do a video appearance without a suit and tie on. So, I am so excited to be out of that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Amazing. So, there's so much going on in open source the last week. We just discussed we had Grok Build was open source, and then we had Thinking Machines, and then Kimi k three, and then Quen 3.8. So you tweeted the other day, Kimi k three is a big moment with multiple implications for the entire industry. Could you go into a little more detail on that? What are these implications?
So if you go back maybe four, five months, I think there was a moment in time when the only leading models were, I think, OPUS four six or four seven at the time, GPT 5.4 or 5.5 or wherever we were, and it felt like there was really no one else. And we were on this curve of self improvement where the Frontier Labs were really going to draw really far away from everyone else. I think the last few weeks, if you are in the token consumption business, which I am and I think many of you and your viewers are, it's been a great time. Because let's see, you had Elon and Michael at Cursor, you know, th
Totally. So I guess, like, the first question here would be, where do you predict the Frontier Labs? Like, how do you predict the Frontier Labs are gonna react to this? Like, now, you know, the ecosystem has been sort of changed. There's no going back. Kimi has been released, it's very close to the capabilities of Fable. So what do you think is next for an Anthropic or an OpenAI?
So a few things. I think it's very clear the frontier labs are going to push at the very, very frontier of the jagged performance we get. As somebody who spent close to the last eighteen, nineteen months trying to make sure America wins, I really want to see the American models, whether it's closed or open weight at the frontier, which And so, think they'll continue to be that. What I suspect these open models could really start putting pressure on them is one on pricing. Because it may turn out that the number of tasks that you need absolutely frontier intelligence from is, let's call it like
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