Dean Ball took a lot of heat this week for calling open source decelerationist. Many people read this as him being personally anti-open source. I don't think that's true. This was my interpretation of what he was saying: if open source is sufficiently capable and ubiquitous, it will eventually destroy the big labs business models. This means they would no longer have funding. To quote Ilya Sutskever from his testimony in the OpenAI vs. Elon Musk trial: 'If there is no funding, there is no big computer.' And without big computer, there can't be big model. In my opinion, what would happen next in this scenario is that the United States Government would step in, nationalize the leading labs, consolidate them into a single federal entity, and then fund it directly through the Department of War under national security. To put into perspective how easily they could do this, the proposed 2027 defense budget is $1.5 trillion. Most people who strongly support open source would probably not see that outcome as ideal, or this future as a pleasant one. This doesn't mean we should abandon open source or stop wishing for its success. It simply means we should take the middle path. There is fire on both sides of us now, and that will likely remain true for the foreseeable future.