What's really open about open-weight AI?

0:02Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of Kimmy K3. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're going to talk about AI models. We've been talking about AI models a lot on the show for the last few weeks in the wake of the OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and all of these new conversations about AI safety and AI deployment and open weight models and the race with China and how we think about and operate AI in general. It all feels like it's coming to a head in some way right now. So The Verge's Robert Hart is going to come on, and he's going to explain to us what's actually going on here.

0:31There's a lot of new vocabulary with these bottles and a lot of new questions about how they work and how they're made. He's going to make sense of all of it for us. I personally am very excited to have somebody finally make sense of all of it for me. We're going to get to that in just a second. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. I'm Jake Kastarnakis, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for August 4th, 2026. Microsoft just started bringing original Xbox games to the PC the other week, and now it's planning to bring Xbox 360 games as well. My colleague Tom Warren has the scoop on a memo that Microsoft sent around to developers, asking them to opt in to the new program.

1:06Microsoft will handle all the emulation hurdles, even customer support. All developers have to do is approve their games for sale and set a price. Microsoft's argument is, why not do it? It's free cash. The rollout is supposed to begin next year. Next up, Apple abruptly pulled Telegram from the App Store last night, before restoring it less than an hour later. Apple told various news outlets that it pulled the app due to the presence of CSAM. Then it restored the app after Telegram removed the content and banned the person who posted it. The whole incident is very odd, and it's actually the second time it's happened.

1:38Apple pulled Telegram in 2018 for the same reason, and again restored it within hours. After this latest incident, Telegram seems downright mad. Telegram spokesperson Remy Vaughn told us that Apple was wrong to pull the app down. Finally, my favorite gadget of the day, my colleague Andrew Leshevsky spotted some new camera batteries from Falcam that have built-in support for Apple's Find My Network to help you track down missing gear. I love this. This seems so much more convenient than attaching an AirTag to every camera you own. It's only available for Canon and Sony right now, but Nikon and Fuji are set to be in the works.

2:10They're a little pricey, though, at up to$70 apiece. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 seconds of The Verge for August 4th, 2026. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.

2:49So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

3:00This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. All right, let's talk AI models. Joining me now, Verge reporter Robert Hart. Welcome to the show. First time on the Vergecast.

3:30Yeah, long time listener, first time joiner. Very happy to have you here. And I've brought you here to do maybe the wonkiest thing we have done on this show in some time. We're going to do a little bit of analysis, a little bit of explainer. But we're in a really interesting and complicated moment with AI that is about technology. It's about politics. It's about feelings. And I want to just piece through it. You've done a really good job covering this on the site. And I want to just walk through some of what's going on right now. But I think we need to start with some fairly straightforward explainery stuff.

4:02because I think a lot of very smart people are getting this stuff wrong. And I want to just talk through it a little bit. So just from a very basic level, help me understand what an open weight model is and why it matters as a concept right now. 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.

4:41And 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. Right. Have you come up with a good metaphor for how to describe weights? It's a really messy but really important term. And I think it's really hard to visualize.

5:16Like open source, I actually think, would be very easy to understand, right? You would see all the training data. You would see how they trained it. You would see what the output looks like. You'd be able to sort of peel the thing apart and understand every piece that went into it. Like you said, open weight models are very deliberately not that. They show this one thing. And I have not come up with a great way to explain it to people who are not sort of deep in the weeds of AI technology. Have you come up with one or heard one that you like? Not really, but on the spot, I guess. I mean, 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.

5:52I 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 the 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 um one by any means but it's kind of a i think an idea of kind of what yeah what what weights might be in this sense and that it's the product of something but it's can still be really useful if you can like build or modify or change.

6:28I like that. Like you couldn't, you couldn't make it yourself without knowing exactly what went into it, but even just knowing what it looks like, you can now go and redraw the thing, which ends up being really important, which brings me to the next thing. I just want to sort of quickly explain before we get into this here, which is who cares? What, what can I do if I'm a developer or a government or somebody paying for one of these models with an open weights model that I can't do with a closed weights model like we've seen from Anthropic and OpenAI? What is the actual sort of user advantage of an open weights model?

7:04Quite 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, And presuming you have the infrastructure, you could run it yourself. You can tweak it with your own data. So you've kind of got a bit more of a personalized model. And I think important for a lot of the debates we're seeing now as well is that they're a lot less monitorable and it's a lot harder for providers, say Anthropic, OpenAI in these cases, to put in the safety rails that might stop it from doing something that you would want it to do.

7:43Okay. So maybe in that sense, the comparison to open source actually is useful in that it doesn't function the same way, but your ability to take it and modify it and use it in your own server array, that is very much the same as if it were pure open source software. You don't get to understand the inner workings of the model in the same way, but you get to use it and adapt it in much the same way. Is that a reasonably close comparison there? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot more restrictions that they might put on it. So some of the ones that are coming out now, they'll have licenses that you have to pay them over a certain threshold.

8:21But yeah, it's a lot more flexible in that way. This is probably an overgeneralization, and I want you to correct the extent to which this is an overgeneralization, but it seems like China has embraced the idea of open-it and wait models in a big way, and the U.S., particularly the sort of frontier labs that we talk about all the time, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, have not. A, is that a fair characterization, and B, why do you think it's broken down like that? To again get annoyingly wonky, it is a bit more complicated than that. But by and large, it is a reasonable characterization. The most prominent US models, as you said, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, their frontier models are all proprietary, they're all closed systems.

9:01And in China, by and large, a lot of them are open weight. There are exceptions, obviously. So Alibaba in China, for example, until its most recent release, a few earlier this year in its frontier scale were proprietary. It kept them closed and it evidently changed its mind this week. And in the US, there is still a big ecosystem of open weight players. I mean, And Meta is the most obvious that comes to mind. Who've been making strides recently, but also Google. I mean, it's not the top tier Gemini ones, but their general models are quite popular. And there's sort of a huge spectrum in between that.

9:42If you grant me the huge generalization, because I think at some point at the absolute frontier, I think that the debate we're having right now is between, you know, companies like Moonshot and like you said, Alibaba in China and the three major labs here in the U.S. Is it purely sort of a political difference that is why China would want its models to be open and the U.S. would want them to be closed? Are we talking about like communism versus capitalism here? Like what do you make of the sort of philosophical difference between those things? I wouldn't go as far to say it is quite a deeply entrenched divide like that, but I think it is quite tempting to see it like that.

10:21I think partly it is business pragmatism in China. It is a way, with all the restrictions that have been put on them by the US, so they've not had access to the top-tier chips, for example, it is harder for them to innovate at the frontier. this is potentially a way of them doing so or of at least kind of working towards that but also from a business strategy point of view there's a huge sort of array of advantages with going open i mean it's cheaper by and large for developers to run it's a much lower barrier to entry there are also the elements we said with privacy or kind of running things on your own system them, you can really grow that ecosystem rapidly.

11:04And it is kind of almost a projection of soft power if your stuff is becoming almost the default. And the Chinese models are being very widely used globally. American companies, Western companies would be very hesitant to send all of their data to China or to servers hosted in China. If it's open, you can get around that. And so it's also quite a nice gateway for them to stay active in these markets. Yeah, that makes sense. So all of this has been sort of burbling in the background for a long time and has really come to the forefront of the whole AI discussion over the last couple of weeks. And it's happening right next to, I think we've talked about a bunch on this show, the OpenAI Hugging Face hack.

11:50Now Anthropic is coming out saying, oh, look, we just noticed we've also been hacking everybody. There is a real AI safety thing happening right now, and open weight models have become a big part of this discussion, kind of on both sides in a strange way. Everybody has feelings about open weight models, no matter how they feel about AI safety. um why has open weight become sort of a core part of the how do we make sure we're doing ai safely discussion there are so many things this could be about but it feels like the industry has decided that the debate we're going to have right now is about open weights why yeah well i mean one and i'll gloss over this just due to the complexity but there is the whole uh specter of the race with China in the States or the West in general, which means something a bit different to quite literally anyone who mutters it.

12:45But that's - We have to beat China at everything. It's just a fact of life in America right now for reasons I continue to largely not understand. But yeah, granting that premise, what else is going on here? Yeah. So there's that, which obviously, yeah, is one reason. So the open-weight models they're releasing, let's go. But then the safety part as well. So the main opposition, or one of the oppositions to the open models is that it's very difficult to both monitor how they're used, which OpenAnanthropic, they know how this is being used. It's hard to implement details like guardrails to stop it by hacking or helping you build a bioweapon, the two kind of main concerns that the frontier labs say.

13:29The fear has always been that releasing something very capable openly puts that in the hands of anyone. Okay. The weird part of this then is OpenAI, it turned out one of its agents hacked HuggingFace, as we know. The difficulty with closed models is these safety rails as well. HuggingFace said in their report, oh, well, we couldn't actually use US frontier models. These safety rails activated. And then they said they turned to one of the leading Chinese providers, ZAI, for their model to help defend itself against one of the closed models that was attacking it, which kind of flips a lot of that on its head.

14:06And so this debate has now really become, I mean, it is by definition a dual-use technology. It can be used to hack, it can also be used to defend against hackers. And so that's kind of been at the core of this now, is that for a long time, the fear has been it would be used as a weapon. and funnily enough, the most high-profile case recently is it's been used as a tool of defending. Wait, so hold on. So let me make sure I understand what happened here because I actually think that's really interesting. I hadn't quite thought about it that way. So OpenAI, closed model, very, very deliberately hard for anyone else to understand, attacks Hugging Face.

14:43Hugging Face says, we need a tool to stop this. We're going to deploy our agents to stop this agent. runs into some safety restriction in the model that they're trying to use, another closed model that is like, no, I won't escape this sandbox and go try to fight this thing. So then they're able to use an open weight model because they're able to just essentially remove those guardrails or they don't exist in the first place because it is open and adaptable in that way. Am I understanding that right? Yeah, in a very kind of, yeah, in a broad sense. What a weird system. Yeah. And so that's, I think, why it has been so, as an issue, it has so rapidly bubbled to the surface.

15:29Something that's been simmering for a long time is because all of these tensions that were there suddenly became very real and very tangible in a way that ties together, as I said, all those fears with China, but also open versus closed. And then also the risks of these closed models of what they are actually capable of doing. This strikes me as the sort of thing people are going to pretty quickly get like borderline religious views about that are going to be very hard to change. Because what you just described is two completely reasonable and totally mutually exclusive theories, right? That one says this technology is too powerful.

16:09We can't put it in the hands of everybody or the bad people will use it and things will go horribly wrong. and we're going to be stuck in this arms race cat and mouse game for forever. The other side says, actually, that's already happening. And the only way to stop it is to put this technology in the hands of everybody. There is no single overlap anywhere between those two things. And it feels like as these models get better and more capable, both sides are going to feel more right about their stance on these things. Like, is there a way to reconcile in the middle of this fight? Wow. Well, I think we'll see.

16:44But I think we have to. I mean, I think even the opponents have kind of, I mean, the one big one that has been to watch has been a lot of these kind of open letters you've seen from like the US tech industry, for example. The notable holdouts, at least at the start, were the big three were Google, OpenAI, Anthropic. To my knowledge, it's only Anthropic that's a continued holdout on that. I might be wrong. They might have signed since. But Daria Amadei has also published a quite lengthy blog post explaining the reasoning and says that we're not against open models, but we cannot only have open models.

17:19And I think that's probably an area that we will end up in, I think. And it's also not to say, I think a lot of this is focused on, like I said, it was more complicated with there are open models in the US. China could also very easily close off some of its frontier models. And I think probably as they get more and more advanced and as sort of that ecosystem develops, I think there'll probably be a mix. Yeah, because you have more economic incentive to close your models, right? You can make more, if you can say and demonstrate our model is the best, which I think Anthropic relatively successfully has been able to do over and over for the last year or so.

18:03every possible upside you want comes from closing off that model right you can make it more expensive you can limit who gets to access it you get to be the the arbiter of good and bad in that model like if you are the best there are lots of good reasons to be closed that almost no one other than the very best model seems to have and this is where we get wrapped up again in the everything is a race against China, if in fact, you know, Kimi is now a better model, like demonstrably better model, and all of a sudden everybody wants it. Suddenly you flip from China wants to have openness and to sort of infiltrate the US and make a lot of headway into businesses and start to capture some of these use cases that people can't afford from the greatest models.

18:45All of a sudden you say, well, we have the best model, we're going to close it off and make a ton of money from it. That does feel very possible to me at this moment. Yeah, I mean, it feels largely what's been happening already is the kind of end of that. I mean, and also there is a safety element. I mean, Anthropic was explicitly founded, basically. It was unhappy with what OpenAI were doing. And I think the argument against Anthropic in many ways at this point is that Anthropic believes that it is the only one who should be trusted, right? Like this is what the government has been saying about Anthropic for some time in the US is that this stance that Dario Amadei is the only one who gets to decide what we do with AI and what we don't do with AI is ridiculous.

19:25And again, like you're free to think whoever you want to be in charge should be in charge. But at some point, either no one is in charge and we just like let chaos reign because that is the thing that will solve this or someone has to be in charge. And I feel like Anthropic has been the one most loudly being like, it's fine. The answer is us. We've got it. And that makes a lot of people really angry. Yeah, absolutely. I think their response to the hugging face incident is actually quite telling. To me, it felt quite petty. That's maybe a controversial view, but it's like, hey, our models can hack things too.

20:02And then you look at the details of it. Their blog detailing this, it quite literally ends in a four bullet point list as to why what happened with them was better than what happened with OpenAI, which, cool. I mean, we're all adults here. Great. It just felt very juvenile, especially when, I mean, OpenAI, it hacked its way out. To me, Anthropics was the important, they kind of left the door open. Like they're saying we're the good guys and their behavior doesn't seem to meet that bar time and again. But they're also, though, I should say, them and OpenA are doing more than a lot of other actors in this field as well.

20:44It just doesn't necessarily meet the expectations they set for themselves.

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24:01no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

24:10It feels like right now is going to be or at least should be an inflection point in a lot of these conversations, right? You have Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, writing the open letter about open weights. You have, like you said, this new open weights alliance. Everybody is getting in fights about China and whether it is winning and whether it's not and whether it matters. we are still very much in the throes of this what do we make of the open AI hugging face hack you wrote last week that it's time to basically stop ignoring AI safety questions and we have to start doing real things about this Sam Altman is out there being like maybe we need to pause everybody's begging for regulation it feels like either this is going to be a very noisy moment that everybody just forgets because somebody will launch a new model and we'll all move on with our lives, or there's going to be some sort of big structural change in how we talk about AI, like as an industry and ultimately as a society.

25:09After writing the piece that it's time to stop ignoring AI safety, what's your read of sort of the temperature of this conversation right now? It's hard to know how to think, I think. I think for a lot of people in this space, is surprising at all. I mean, I said from mine, it's disappointing from my point of view that such a basic error might happen, but it's not surprising. We know that these tools can do this. And I think what it does do is it's, and this is something that has been warned about, at least in theory, for at least a decade, I'd say, if not a lot longer. The problem is, I think it was lacking a really tangible example, which obviously, we know in policy, politics, anything that is needed.