Tokenless

Kimi k3

How Open Source Became AI's Backbone | Inferact with a16z

How Open Source Became AI's Backbone | Inferact with a16z

Simon Mo, CEO of Inferact and lead maintainer of vLLM, discusses how open-source AI, exemplified by vLLM, transformed into critical infrastructure. The conversation highlights the technical complexities of serving LLMs, the evolving economics and licensing of open-weight models, the need for control over guardrails, and the rapidly disappearing capability gap between open and proprietary AI.

Open Models: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC Speech, Distillation, The Open-Closed Gap, and What's Next

Open Models: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC Speech, Distillation, The Open-Closed Gap, and What's Next

Nathan Lambert and Florian Brand discuss the accelerating open model landscape, focusing on the surge in Chinese models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. They explore the reasons behind China's progress, the evolving US ecosystem, the cybersecurity implications of open-source bans, and debunk common misconceptions about distillation, particularly challenging Ben Thompson's recent claims. The episode concludes with predictions and a frontier model tier list.