Podbit · The a16z Show
The most capable open-weight models right now are Kimi K3, Deepseek, and Qwen — all Chinese. Sriram Krishnan says flatly: he would much rather the leading models be American. Gemma, Nimotron, and new startups are trying, but the U.S. is currently behind.
Where this was said
At 15:40 · chapter starts 13:40
Theo raises an Axios report that the Trump administration is considering restricting Chinese open-source AI models, citing either national security concerns or the fact that they have reached near-Claude-level capability in agentic coding. Krishnan has no inside information from his former colleagues, but he can offer context. [1] — Sriram Krishnan "The most capable open-weight models right now are Kimi K3, Deepseek, and Qwen — all Chinese. Sriram Krishnan says flatly: he would much rat…" 15:40 The Trump administration's AI action plan, which he helped craft, explicitly champions open source in its opening section — so any blanket crackdown on open-source AI would be in tension with the administration's own stated policy. But Krishnan is blunt on one point: the fact that the leading open-weight models — Kimi K3, Deepseek, Qwen — are Chinese rather than American is not a comfortable situation. He rattles off the American efforts underway: Gemma from Google, Nimotron from NVIDIA, Thinking Machines, new startups. He expects them to improve. But the current moment is one where Chinese models lead open source, and that has real implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and the deployment of AI by allied governments.
The Trump administration's AI action plan explicitly highlighted the importance of open source AI in its opening section, signaling early policy support.
Linus Torvalds said 'given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.' Sriram Krishnan applies this to AI: open-weight models downloaded from Hugging Face can be inspected by the entire world, making them inherently more auditable than closed frontier models. Security through transparency, not obscurity.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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