TabulAI founder Bojan Tunguz challenges Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's claim that open-weight AI models lack collaborative advantages

Dario's args:

"Opensource you can see the source, here you cannot see inside the model" - yes you can that's literally the open weights part btw. - I cannot see the weights inside Claude, but I can GLM 5.2 - Models like Nemotron3 Ultra go further, all the data, training scripts, and model is opensource.

"Alot of the benefits like many people working on it, being additive doesn't work in same way" - yes it does. We have seen endless fine tunes of various open source models for real improvements.

"Ultimately you have to host it on the cloud" - no you dont. Dario is seemingly totally unaware of smaller moes and even dense models like qwen 27B.

Not only does dario not take part in social media, I am beginning to think he's never tried open source models at all and has no idea wtf hes on about

So. I have added perspective for this:

The company I work for uses AI and we got hit in the anthropic outages past week.

I go to buy an AI workstation by corsair:

1) I can't buy them in CA supposedly due to CEC suddenly? but I can buy a juiced out gaming computer or server? LOL. Smells like an artificial block by Amazon.

2) The mini servers like sparks and AMD AI 350 workstations that have the CPUs to use AI locally started selling out after we purchased a few last night

I feel more and more like there is just so much VC money wrapped up in AI that if it fails because the everyday person can just run it like any old software program, that our economy will tank. And these big players are onto this as they try to take the companies public. China I'd say has an incentive in some ways to cause chaos here, maybe less so since we're also a consumer of their production and economy, but still! Its worth just considering different parties abroad and at home here in the US and their stake in all of this.

A different angle: I will say that if demand can't be met and smaller companies are frozen from accessing AI...and if Fable 5, Mythos and GPT 5.6 are withheld purposely to keep a mote around existing software companies like Windows, Slack, etc. you name it, its probably to keep certain players in the game and box others out. If time is no longer a factor and its just money, energy and compute with a good LLM to rebuild or build an equivocal better product in many cases, we're just all in a race and its a matter of who has resources now.

I say this not with conviction but as food for thought since the landscape is just so varied.

You have to realize most people are not exposed to the local AI ecosystem here on X or reddit/discord. Most people are shocked or don't believe me when I tell them that I run models on my MacBook, including uncensored models and finetined versions.

Dario knows that his words carry a lot of weight (there are many claude fans in corporate and many of them are "anthropic or nothing") He knows that this clip will be many people's only information about open source models. So he is being intentionally obtuse. He wants to believe that it doesn't matter if a model is open source. He's moving the goalposts to "is it a good model?" Which is actually so simplistic because there are other factors like cost & speed.

He wants to set the rubric of what success means so that he can win.