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Nathan Lambert quote, Sep 21, 2026

Author, Interconnects · Sep 21, 2026 · Post, The current balance of power in open models

Since about April 2025, Chinese AI companies have been the clear leader in open-weight models.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Nathan Lambert

Quote
The simple metric showing this is Hugging Face Downloads, where China took the lead in July of 2025 primarily through the success of Alibaba’s Qwen models.Sep 21, 2026· Post
I have my doubts that the labs can afford to spend a constant portion of this compute on internal R&D as the total volume goes up, especially with plans to IPO, as they face increased scrutiny on basic economics.Sep 19, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Sep 19, 2026· Post
The step from this anxiety, and incidents like OpenAI-HuggingFace, to extinction risks feels very religious.Sep 19, 2026· Post
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).Sep 9, 2026· Post
If given 100 years to diffuse into society, its impacts will certainly become much more obvious, like the industrial revolutions of centuries past.Sep 9, 2026· Post
Open models lack the central economic champion to represent the potential downside of action against them.Jul 12, 2026· Post
The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.Jul 12, 2026· Post
The primary driver motivating regulation today is the inevitable truth that an open-weights model will soon reach the capabilities of Claude’s Mythos model.Jul 12, 2026· Post

On the same topics

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Basically anything that can be learned through RL can be distilled very easily, because it’s a small number of bits.John SchulmanSep 11, 2026· Interview
Cost-saving efforts reveal that moving simpler workloads to open AI models is the easiest way to save ~50% on AI bills.Gergely OroszSep 3, 2026· Post
The long and short of it is this: marginal costs are back in a big way, both in terms of short-term implications of state-of-the-art free models, and in terms of the long-term structure of the industry.Ben ThompsonJul 20, 2026· Post
I think the reason it is relatively easy for open source and previous laggards to catch up to within months of the frontier is that data is the real driver of progress.Dwarkesh PatelJun 19, 2026· Essay
By shaping the capabilities of these systems from the ground up, we can help establish a global foundation for AI that empowers developers to build the next generation of applications.Arthur MenschMar 16, 2026· Statement
Open frontier models are how AI becomes a true platform...Arthur MenschMar 16, 2026· Statement
About this quote
Said by
Nathan Lambert, Author, Interconnects
Where
The current balance of power in open models
Topics
Open-source
Company
Interconnects
Source
interconnects.ai/p/the-current-balance-of-power-in-open

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