Quote · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Socialists Sweep NYC, China Catches Up in Coding, AI Memory Crunch, Micron's Blowout Quarter
Where this was said
China's open-source AI catch up, distillation, OpenAI's new chip
At 59:19 · chapter starts 45:12
Debate over whether Dario Amodei engineered Fable's rollback to gain a regulatory moat [1] — Gavin Baker "Anthropic has spent years advocating for an FAA-style approval process for AI. When a jailbreak report from a trusted partner triggered Fab…" 55:37 . David Sacks warns the US is on a shot clock — slowing down won't slow China, which operates outside US jurisdiction.
China's Z.AI released GLM 5.2, a 744 billion parameter open-source model with a 1 million token context window under the permissive MIT license.
GLM 5.2 API usage costs are 85% cheaper than GPT-5.5 for comparable performance, making it a highly cost-effective alternative.
The founder of Z.AI told Elon Musk that open-weight frontier-level AI capabilities will be available from China before Q1 2027.
China runs farms of tens of thousands of devices querying Claude and GPT APIs through masked accounts, harvesting every reasoning trace and feeding them back into their own models. This distillation cheat sheet has brought them to within a tick of the US frontier — for a fraction of the cost.
The future is composable models: a router sends 85% of queries to a cheap open-source model fine-tuned on your own data, and only the hardest tasks go to frontier models like Claude or GPT. Open source doesn't kill frontier labs — it shifts economic value to infrastructure and makes the whole system more powerful.
Anthropic has spent years advocating for an FAA-style approval process for AI. When a jailbreak report from a trusted partner triggered Fable to be rolled back, Anthropic got its regulatory moat — while simultaneously getting hoisted on its own petard. The question is whether this was calculated.
Chamath argued that despite China being 24 months behind on silicon and 6 months behind on models, they are only a few months behind in total AI capability.
