Nathan Lambert on a16z: Can Open Models Keep Up With OpenAI and Anthropic?
a16z · youtube · 2026-10-14
a16z's Lisha Li interviews Nathan Lambert on the open-vs-closed gap: frontier labs hold structural advantages in compute, capital, and pioneering new training paradigms, while Chinese open-model labs follow closely. They debate distillation vs talent, data and RL environments as the real drivers of frontier progress, and his new nonprofit lab Trillium, which will release RL environments and document AI automating AI research to demystify recursive self-improvement.
Related event: Nathan Lambert launches nonprofit open-source lab Trillium(3 posts)→
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