Ben Horowitz: The Fight Over Open Source AI

If you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. So the Internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, like, fire a lot. The safest thing for the world is that there's not one AI to rule them all, that there's AI for everybody, and I think that open source is basically the best path towards that goal. It's probably the single most important AI market is probably less than 3% penetrated. Should AI be open? Theo Jaffe and Sofia Puccini are joined by Ben Horowitz to discuss the battle over open source AI, why he believes open models are essential to innovation and national security, and what the future of AI competition means for startups, Frontier Labs, and the broader technology ecosystem. We are live with Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz who needs no introduction. So we'll just dive right into it. Ben, welcome back to MTS. Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. So so much has happened in the world of open source, open weights in the last couple of weeks. It's gotten, you know, it's gotten real. There's there's some drama going on. There's an open letter released by NVIDIA today, called Open Weights in American AI Leadership signed by many companies, including Andreessen Horowitz. So can you tell us a little bit about, the intent behind this letter and what you hope to achieve from it? Yeah. So I think that it's it's probably the single most important, policy issue around AI, that's kinda currently going on. And, you know, the kind of battle is between kind of almost an anti competitive stance, guys in a, in a in a kind of safety cloak Yeah. For is kind of what we ought to be doing. And so if you look at, well, you know, why is open source important? And there's there's there's many reasons. You know, the first will just start academia. Like, academia is completely out of the AI game, if they're still open source. So, like, that goes away. I think, secondly, you know, we we just had a really interesting security incident with OpenAI, hacking into Hugging Face. And the only way Hugging Face was able to prevent it because the proprietary model said guardrails, which prevented them from doing security tasks, was to use an open source model. So, you know and I think the important point there is you can't actually ban open source, of course. Mhmm. You know, it it's it's out there. It's a file. It's on the Internet. Like, you we we have no way of doing that. And it reminds me of, you know, years ago when I was at Netscape, they tried to ban cryptography. And, like, there's you know, the math is out there. Like, you're not gonna ban it. It's not actually possible. But you can prevent the good guys from using it. And that's what would happen, I think, in …