The Open Source AI Question (Robert Wright & Nathan Lambert)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
0:28 Nathan’s work at AI2—and his p(doom) 5:00 What does “open source AI” mean? 11:01 How Nathan taught a Llama new tricks 18:05 Pros and cons of open sourcing AI 29:21 Nathan's ATOM Project to boost American open models 37:58 What's behind OpenAI's open source play? 40:20 Geoffrey Hinton's case against open models 44:27 Is the US-China open model rivalry really zero-sum? 51:32 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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, Nathan. |
| 0:29.6 | Hi, Bob. |
| 0:31.6 | How you doing? |
| 0:33.6 | Good. |
| 0:34.6 | It'd be fun to chat. |
| 0:35.6 | I'm looking forward to it. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter. |
| 0:41.2 | This is the Non-Zero podcast available on our YouTube channel, Non-Zero YouTube channel and our podcast feed. |
| 0:50.3 | You are Nathan Lambert. You're an AI guy. For starters, you build open source large language models at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, |
| 1:04.0 | which is also known as AI2, I assume, because the initials of Allen Institute and artificial intelligence are both AI. |
| 1:12.8 | Did I get that one right? |
| 1:14.2 | Yeah, that's all right. |
| 1:15.8 | Okay. |
| 1:16.7 | And it is funded by the estate of the late Paul Allen, who was a co-founder of Microsoft. |
| 1:25.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:26.5 | And I think they do a lot of stuff other than AI maybe as well. |
| 1:33.0 | Is there a larger Allen Institute that's... |
| 1:35.3 | There's multiple Allen Institute. |
| 1:37.0 | So the first one was actually the Allen Institute, which we call the Allen Institute for Biology, |
| 1:43.0 | or we call it AI1. |
| 1:45.9 | And then the Allen Institute for AI came after. The Paul Allen umbrella in Seattle runs wide. So there are a lot of other things, |
| 1:53.6 | but I don't know of any other by the Allen Institute name. Okay. And you are in Seattle where so many |
... |
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