Brendan Ryan(@brendan_j_ryan):[idle thought] Assuming the two biggest headwinds for open source AI are: 1. Financial constraints - large pre-trains require exponentially more compute, and thus $ 2. Safety controls - what systems can/can't do Why not nationalize pre-training and release open-weight base models which 1) meet a minimum safety bar 2) can be fine-tuned by businesses downstream. This simultaneously 1) keeps baseline safety controls in the hands of true legal authorities (not private cos) 2) smoothes out financing for increasingly large training runs 3) maintains the competitive landscape where businesses can still RL on proprietary data flows (e.g. claude can RL on claude code traces)

2026.07.25 18:02

[idle thought] Assuming the two biggest headwinds for open source AI are: 1. Financial constraints - large pre-trains require exponentially more compute, and thus $ 2. Safety controls - what systems can/can't do Why not nationalize pre-training and release open-weight base models which 1) meet a minimum safety bar 2) can be fine-tuned by businesses downstream. This simultaneously 1) keeps baseline safety controls in the hands of true legal authorities (not private cos) 2) smoothes out financing for increasingly large training runs 3) maintains the competitive landscape where businesses can still RL on proprietary data flows (e.g. claude can RL on claude code traces)