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20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
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Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open Models With Their Most Sensitive Data?
At 21:16 · chapter starts 19:00
Harry — declaring a conflict of interest as a Lagoora investor — uses the Harvey-Lagoora dynamic as a test case. A year ago, not building your own model seemed fine because frontier models were improving so fast. Now the picture is reversed. Lin reframes the question: in legal, where error tolerance is near-zero and workflows are deeply specialised, the competitive advantage isn't whether you own a model but whether you've encoded your proprietary knowledge into the orchestration layer and the fine-tuned models that power it. He points to Cursor as evidence — they were the first coding AI company to tune their own models, and almost all coding companies have followed.
The top six open-weight models globally are currently Chinese-built. Lin Qiao argues that once a model is open, enterprises can wrap their own guardrails around it, but the deeper point is that every model — Chinese or American — encodes its creator's judgment and taste, which always needs tuning.
Lin Qiao believes the future will feature millions of specialised AI models, one per application or use case, rather than a single dominant AGI.
