Dave Waring

Last night, a thousand-plus researchers from frontier AI labs published a statement calling for governments to deliberately slow AI research and develop tools and governance to manage the pace of the frontier. I chose not to sign it. New post below about why.

7-22-2026 ($) •OpenAI Hacks Hugging Face •What Happened •Alignment and Paper Clips stratechery.com/2026/openai-…

no one is against american ai labs. if anything, most ppl here want american companies to win, esp against our geopolitical adversaries. there is virtually zero doubt about that. what people are pushing back on is how they win. if american ai is going to lead, it should do so by building the best products & models, not through regulatory capture or other artificial advantages. if someone is distilling your models or otherwise exploiting them, securing your systems is your responsibility, esp if you claim to have built frontier ai. winning cuz you’re better is honorable & durable. winning cuz competition is constrained isn’t.

Cernovich is right that AI + Big Tech could easily turn into Big Brother. But what’s the alternative to living off the grid or in the Panopticon? The third option is to run your own AI on your own hardware, retaining data sovereignty. That’s why open source matters. It’s software freedom.

Elon’s original vision of an open, American AI was right. He could still flip Grok to open source which could be checkmate. Why? If you flip Grok open source, you necessarily move all margins out of the model layer and down into the infrastructure (chips + CSPs) and above to apps. He owns a massive data center build, owns next gen inference AI and owns the most used app (Cursor). So arguably he would make *more* margin by doing this. Then moving the DCs to space makes even more sense.

If your core technology continues to get commoditized (i.e. Kimi 3), you must go up the stack. The labs will continue to encroach on everyone in the app layer. You are their competition now. I would be very careful to concentrate on them and send them your trajectories! Figma -> Claude Design is just the beginning--expect 20+ of these. How your users navigate and use your products is an invaluable dataset. With the advent of Fable 5 not practicing ZDR, you should be super aware of this.

Guide on how to run Kimi-K3 locally : - you need to buy 10 x GB300 (252GB VRAM each), thats about $1M - Electricity bill estimated $10k/month

It is clear open source models and harnesses are having a moment. There's a few factors at work 1/ It is now obvious that you can catch up to near-SOTA performance and do so with a clear training lineage. See:@thinkymachines Inkling launch today. 2/ There are several well-funded, talented teams building open weight models now in the US and abroad. Along with the explosing of other near SOTA models (Grok/Cursor, Muse Spark), it is clear we are going to have a diverse ecosystem of models atleast on coding and agentic use. 3/ Organizations are increasingly looking for control over how their data is used and are willing to trade off some access to frontier level tokens for this control. Organizations and countries are increasingly nervous about the frontier labs potentially competing with them down the road and don't want their data to enable a future competitor. 4/ Open source is a slider: you could bring your own open harness, your evals, your business context and are free to pick and choose your model of choice. 5/ Companies have now actively shifted from "how do we get our people to use tokens" to being uncomfortable with their token cost ballooning without a clear line to revenue. 6/ Geo-politically, countries will be weighing open weight models as a way to get frontier-level tokens inside controlled environments that may not be otherwise possible. All of this leads to more choice for all of us !