Nathan Lambert, former post-training co-lead at the Allen Institute for AI, now launching Trillium, a nonprofit open AI lab, joins a16z's Lisha Li to discuss whether open models can really keep up with the frontier.

When he tells researchers in China that an average OpenAI researcher reportedly has five thousand H100s to work with, "their jaw just falls to the floor." In his view, Chinese labs have the talent but are mostly short on compute.

He also thinks the distillation story is overblown. Based on the research, he puts its edge at a few months, and says "there's a bit of cope" in thinking only American labs can build good models.

A lot of frontier progress outside math and code comes down to labs buying 1) data and 2) RL environments. It's a multibillion-dollar market, and some of it is sloppy enough to teach models to reward hack.

That's a big part of why Trillium exists. Nathan wants to give away the environments other people would sell, and show exactly how his team uses AI to build AI, including where the models still get stuck. His bet is that the more people can see how this works, the better prepared everyone is for what's coming.

0:55 Can open models keep up with the frontier?
2:05 What it takes to reach the frontier
3:55 Open weights and the fast-follower playbook
8:25 Chinese labs: equal talent, less compute
9:55 Why distillation is harder than it looks
14:55 Is distillation theft or competition?
16:20 The lab flywheel vs owning your weights
21:45 Can general models beat every specialist?
26:30 AI at 1% of today's cost in 4 years
27:15 The RL env boom and reward hacking
31:30 What Trillium will build in the open
35:30 Breaking into AI in the age of AI slop
38:05 Open-sourcing how AI builds AI
44:25 Why Nathan isn't pre-training
49:45 Agent swarms and why lab secrets leak
54:25 Fast takeoff vs risks already here

YouTube: https://youtu.be/BKuK0M6oDTI

@natolambert @trillium_labs @lishali88