Sacks argues open-sourcing makes strategic sense for DeepSeek as a Chinese company trying to catch up.
“And so if you're if you're behind and you're trying to catch up, then open source is a strategy that actually really makes sense for you.”
“Harvey is a great example of how American companies are building world-class specialized models: they took an open-source base (Kimi K3), post-trained it on legal data, and delivered state-of-the-art performance on legal benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of frontier models. https://t.co/YO2tE0O11f”
Sacks warns an open source ban is coming by requiring open models to meet closed model standards.
“I got bad news for you, Jamaf. An open source ban is coming. They're not gonna call it that. You know what they're going to say?”
Sacks argues that regulatory restrictions on open-source AI models would be ineffective because Chinese labs would continue developing advanced models regardless.
“Restrictions that kneecap open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping the next Kimi.”
Sacks predicts an open source AI ban disguised as equal standards for open and closed models.
“An open source ban is coming. They're not going to call it that. They're going to say that we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to close.”
Sacks explains that open models cannot be monitored or rolled back after release due to local deployment.
“Once you release an open model into the world, you can't roll it back and you can't monitor exactly how people are using it because they run it on their own hardware.”
Sacks predicts open models will be gradually shut out due to inability to meet closed-model standards.
“The open models cannot comply in the same way and gradually they will be shut out of the market.”