Ben Horowitz: The Fight Over Open Source AI
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Why does Ben argue open-source AI is critical for safety and competition?
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, by 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 policy issue around AI. It feels like we're at a stable equilibrium in the market, but the truth is the 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 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 probably the single most important policy issue around AI that's kind of currently going on. And, you know, the kind of battle is between kind of almost an anti-competitive stance guised in a kind of safety cloak is kind of what we ought to be doing. And so if you look at why is open source important, and there's many reasons. The first will just start academia. Academia is completely out of the AI game if there's no open source. So that goes away. I think secondly, 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 models had guardrails which prevented them from doing security tasks, was to use an open source model.
And I think the important point there is you can't actually ban open source, of course. It's out there. It's a file. It's on the internet. We have no way of doing that. And it reminds me of years ago when I was at Netscape, they tried to ban cryptography. And the math is out there. You're not going to 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 the case of an open source ban is, you know, the threats would be, well, you can't work with the U.S. government if you use open source or you can't do this. So a company like Hugging Face would not be able to actually use the product. So that, you know, would be bad. But then kind of getting into...
If you look at the history of the industry, the open-source version of everything has been much safer. The Internet and Linux were far safer than Windows by a lot. And why is that? Well, because the whole community could work on the safety problems as opposed to just a company and particularly a monopoly company that, you know, like you can't. Even if Windows has a million security bugs, there's nothing we can do about it because it was a monopoly at the time, right? And so that, you know, that's a very difficult position for the world to be in. If you look at – now, the argument against open AI or AI being open source is, oh, well, nobody understands how the weights work. So, you know, it's not like people could inspect it.
But – Why is it better to not see the whites if that's the case? And I think in reality, if you look at the really tough problems that we have safety-wise, the toughest being reward hacking currently. And obviously, Anthropic has not solved it. Obviously, OpenAI has not solved it because we just had these incidents. Well, shouldn't the whole world be able to look at, okay, how are the weights moving?
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