About this episode
The episode discusses the ongoing advancements in AI and their potential future implications, particularly focusing on the differences between open and closed models.
As the years of AI progress go by, it’s been accompanied by a slowly rising tide of consequence. Models are getting more capable, how we work is changing quickly, economics of AI are becoming real, just as real-world risks come to the forefront. 2026 is the first year where I don’t think there’ll be any breaks from this. The hard part to prepare for is that there’s a good chance things just continue to ratchet up from here – more disruption, more surprises, more stakes. On my end, there’s been a growing list of topics that are very fateful to how I see the current state of AI, but I haven’t even gotten to write about them (at least not from all the angles I want to)! All of these are closely related to the implications of different models reaching new capability levels and how I use that to infer what may come next. 1. Open models haven’t had their true agent moment like Opus 4.5 The time gap between open and closed models is very often discussed, but the reality is that we have a nice time-gating that’s independent of debatable benchmarks – if open-weight models do or do not become super useful in agentic harnesses. The Opus 4.5 in Claude Code moment of December 2025 was so loud…
People in this episode
Host: Nathan Lambert
Topics covered
- AI progress
- economic implications of AI
- open vs closed models
- future of work
- technological disruption
Keywords
- AI
- Opus 4.5
- Claude Code
- economic implications
- technological disruption
- open models
- closed models
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Opus 4.5, Claude Code
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- Open and closed models are on different exponentials · June 1, 2026 · 7 min
- Notes from inside China's AI labs · May 7, 2026 · 17 min
- The distillation panic · May 4, 2026 · 9 min
- My bets on open models, mid-2026 · April 15, 2026 · 7 min
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