NonZero Newsletter
Robert Wright's Nonzero
The Open Source AI Question (Robert Wright & Nathan Lambert)
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Preview
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The Open Source AI Question (Robert Wright & Nathan Lambert)

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app.

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0:00 Nathan’s work at AI2—and his p(doom)
4:36 What does “open source AI” mean?
10:37 How Nathan taught a Llama new tricks
17:41 Pros and cons of open sourcing AI
28:57 Nathan's ATOM Project to boost American open models
37:34 What's behind OpenAI's open source play?
39:56 Geoffrey Hinton's case against open models
44:03 Is the US-China open model rivalry really zero-sum?
51:08 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nathan Lambert (The Allen Institute for AI, https://www.interconnects.ai/). Recorded August 12, 2025.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Nathan’s newsletter:

Overtime titles:

0:00 China's open source ecosystem
4:44 AI threat inflation vs China threat inflation
12:19 Open source AI by the numbers
21:07 Nathan: DeepSeek changed everything
23:27 Is open AI a threat to OpenAI?
28:41 The future of training and compute
32:30 Meta’s and Apple’s AI strategies (or lack thereof)
38:44 Is AI alignment overblown?

Overtime video:

This post is for paid subscribers