Sriram Krishnan says U.S. open-weight startups face a much tighter distillation problem
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-07-21
Sriram Krishnan argues that the AI ecosystem is structurally uneven: every model bootstraps from human knowledge, but today some countries’ models can train on American models, while American open-weight startups may face much tighter constraints when trying to distill from other American models. The thread frames this as a broader competitive problem for open models in the U.S.: Chinese models may be able to gather reasoning traces and other model outputs more freely, while American teams may be boxed in by access and policy asymmetries.
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