Can Open Models Keep Up With OpenAI and Anthropic? | Nathan Lambert

Nathan Lambert, AI researcher and founder of the nonprofit Trillium, joins Lisha Li to examine how durable the gap is between frontier closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and open-weight models. The discussion covers compute, data, and talent as the drivers of model progress, how much distillation really matters for Chinese open labs, the evolution of post-training toward RL environments, and why open research on RL environments and recursive self-improvement is needed to demystify what frontier systems can and cannot do.