Unchained
Unchained
Laura Shin
Bits + Bips: Does Capitalism Doom Every Closed AI Model to Get Copied?
12 minutes Posted Jul 29, 2026 at 5:51 pm.
pm ET. Subscribe to catch it live.
Jensen Huang's surprise letter reignites the AI open weight fight
Nick Carter, Julian Schrittwieser, and David Sacks pile on
'Virtue signaling' and what happens if China's open models are permanent 
Lorenzo's balanced take: open models aren't a free panacea
Lorenzo on DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's reported valuations
Ram's closing case: capitalism, distillation, and the Wright brothers
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Show notes
šŸ“¢ Bits + Bips has its own channel now — full episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@Bitsandbips 
Jensen Huang had been running the world's most valuable company for years without ever posting on X. When he finally did, it wasn't a hello. It was an open letter arguing that open AI models are a national asset — and within two days the signatory list had doubled to 50 companies.
Anthropic and Amazon still haven't signed. Austin Campbell walks the panel through who did, who didn't, and the fight that broke out underneath it: Nick Carter arguing the government doesn't owe the large labs a business model, an Anthropic researcher publicly needling Huang about open-sourcing CUDA, Andrew Ng calling that a false equivalence, and Joe Weisenthal asking whether any of it is more than virtue signaling.
Then it gets concrete. Lorenzo Valente makes the case that cheap open models aren't actually cheap once you price them per task, and asks why the US has no answer to a DeepSeek raising at a reported $70 billion valuation. Ram Ahluwalia closes with the Wright brothers, who watched Boeing and Lockheed Martin build an industry on their patents and never saw a cent of it.
So can a closed model survive being copied — or is getting copied just what happens?
Hosts:
Austin Campbell, Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Group, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern
Ram Ahluwalia, Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of Lumida
Chris Perkins, Co-host of Bits + Bips and Head of Franklin Crypto
Guest:
Lorenzo Valente - Director of Research at ARK Invest
This clip is from a longer conversation on the open weight versus closed weight AI fight. Full episode here: https://youtu.be/lMZtZwolaeA?si=16-Z4TP227B2OUJl 
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