Ben Horowitz says open-source AI could be safer, but critics say compute is the real bottleneck
scaling01 · x · 2026-07-26
Ben Horowitz, in the quoted post, argues that open-source AI can be safer because the wider community can help work on safety issues instead of leaving them to a single company.
The reply pushes back on a simplistic comparison, saying:
- AI can be used defensively and offensively.
- A trained model is not something everyone can freely modify like a GitHub PR.
- Safety work on models takes serious compute, not just code review.
The core disagreement is whether openness meaningfully improves safety when model weights and compute are the real bottlenecks.
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