Robert Hart

speaker

181 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Robert Hart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Vergecast · What's really open about open-weight AI? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

Yeah, long time listener, first time joiner, so.

Yeah, so I mean, to get even more annoyingly wonky, it's perhaps important to start with what it's not.

And I think a lot here is caught up in a kind of open source.

And that's what we know traditionally from software, where it's pretty free, it's distributed, you can change it, you can make money from it as long as you also share it freely.

Now open weight models are not quite that open.

And so wonky part number two is they are only really open on a thing called weights, which are kind of those numerical parameters, those sort of knobs and buttons that an AI has during training that kind of helps it tick, process information, all of that.

And that's the only bit that's really made open here.

So you can download it, you can build on that, you can use it, but it is not the same as say an open source where you can kind of reconstitute it from scratch.

I almost imagine, you know, when you kind of have a piece of wood and you run an electric current through it, and it makes that sort of forked pattern.

Yeah.

I almost imagine the weights as the kind of resultant image that might come off in that it kind of is something that is the result of something.

You couldn't make it from scratch without replicating everything precisely, including the wood, but also the electric, even the weather.

But it's still quite useful in terms of you can sort of see the paths, you can trace it, and it's not a perfect one by any means, but it's kind of a...

I think an idea of what weights might be in this sense and that it's the product of something, but it can still be really useful if you can build or modify or change.

Quite a lot, really.

I mean, it's a lot more flexible.

You have a lot more freedom to do largely whatever you want with it.

You're not reliant on sending them your data, which is a big thing for a lot of different companies.

You could, presuming you have the infrastructure, you could run it yourself.

You can tweak it with your own data.

Showing 1–20 of 181 · page 1 of 10