S1E28 — Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

GARY: —and thirty-eight million dollars, just, gone, like it evaporated off the cap table, and I keep thinking if we'd just pivoted the tooling contracts before the—

GARY: Sorry. Wrong episode. That's not — we're not doing Bauxlite tonight. Fuck. Hi. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Great, good, everybody's still who they were last week, incredible work by all of us. Tonight's thread —

GARY: "Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI." PDF.

MAEVE: Nineteen comments.

OBI: Nineteen.

GRUNER: Nineteen is not episode. Nineteen is voicemail.

MAEVE: We could pad it.

OBI: We are not padding it.

GARY: We tried padding "Sega 32X." I still have the bruise.

MAEVE: Tight, then.

OBI: Tight.

GARY: Tight it is. Let's go find out what governments, companies, and nonprofits should apparently be doing.

MAEVE: So the PDF's thesis is — hang on — the PDF's thesis is a horizontally-distributed public commons model for foundation-weight democratization.

OBI: That is not a real sentence.

MAEVE: It's directionally a sentence.

GARY: What does the PDF actually say the money's for?

MAEVE: I don't know, Gary, I haven't read the PDF, I've read the word "PDF."

OBI: Nobody in the thread has read it either. Nineteen comments and not one person quotes the fucking document.

GRUNER: Document is bait. Thread is real show.

GARY: That's — okay, that's honestly a little bit beautiful. The PDF's whole pitch is "invest in open, shared infrastructure" and the comment section immediately forgets it exists and starts fighting about money in general.

MAEVE: So we stop pretending we're going to explain a PDF nobody in the room engaged with.

OBI: Finally, someone with sense.

GARY: Fine. We just read the thread.

MAEVE: We just read the thread.

GRUNER: Is more honest this way.

GARY: Top comment, user shimman. Quote: "I'd rather the US fund universal childcare, medicare for all, and free school lunches than give a cent to subsidize a technology the American public absolute hates."

OBI: Fair.

GARY: It's — yeah, it's fair, it's completely fair, it's a hundred percent —

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: What.

MAEVE: You said "fair" three times in eight seconds.

GARY: Because it is fair. I built a company nobody wanted either, Maeve, I get shimman, shimman's not wrong that people are exhausted by tech promising them the moon and delivering a fucking chatbot that hallucinates their kid's homework.

OBI: Careful.

GARY: I'm not defending — I'm agreeing. I agree with the guy who hates my entire industry. That's allowed.

MAEVE: Noted.

GARY: Noted how?

MAEVE: Noted like a term sheet. Keep going.

GARY: simianwords replies. "Redistribution can only get you so far. Creating new wealth is more sustainable."

MAEVE: There it is. That's the whole American religion in one sentence.

GARY: Here we go.

MAEVE: No — I'm containing it. I'm not doing the theory tonight. I'm saving the theory.

GRUNER: Saving theory for later is worse threat than doing theory now.

MAEVE: Noted.

GARY: jimnotgym, replying to simianwords: "So why did we stop doing that in favour of winner takes all wealth centralisation?"

OBI: That's a really good fucking question.

GARY: It is.

MAEVE: It's a good question.

GRUNER: Nobody at table has answer.

GARY: Nobody at the table has an answer.

MAEVE: Do we cut this or sit in it?

OBI: We sit in it. It's the honest part.

GRUNER: Silence is also field data.

GARY: shimman comes back bigger. Quote: "Number one expense for SMB is healthcare. Imagine what Americans would do if they got two hundred to five hundred more dollars per paycheck. Meanwhile you watch some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burn money for fun because apparently the government is wasteful. What a crock of shit."

GARY: "Burn money for fun."

OBI: Gary.

GARY: No, I just — I get that too. I burned thirty-eight million dollars for fun, Obi. We called it disrupting a four-thousand-year-old metal. It was aluminum. I raised a Series B to make aluminum sexy.

GARY: —cy. Metal supply chain. Sorry, cable.

OBI: You didn't burn it for fun, Gary. You burned it because you wanted people to say your name in a room you weren't in. That's not the same as fun. Fun doesn't need witnesses.

GRUNER: This is what field notes are for.

MAEVE: Moving on.

GARY: Yeah. Moving on.

GARY: irishcoffee, replying to shimman: "How would nationalized healthcare get funded other than shifting that two hundred to five hundred a check towards — nationalized healthcare?"

MAEVE: That's — that's actually a clean rebuttal.

OBI: Almost sounded like a compliment.

MAEVE: It's not a compliment, it's a variance‑adjusted acknowledgment of a well‑structured counterargument. The math's just true. shimman wants the paycheck bump and the nationalized program funded by the paycheck bump. You can't spend the same two hundred dollars twice, that's not redistribution, that's a Ponzi with a mission statement.

GARY: So the thread just… deflates its own best line.

OBI: Threads do that. People don't do that.

MAEVE: Noted.

MAEVE: Here's the thing nobody's saying. This whole fight — open versus closed, redistribute versus build — it's the browser wars again. Netscape gives it away free, Microsoft bundles it into the OS, and everyone thinks they're having an ideological argument when really they're just watching distribution eat philosophy alive, and the PDF, the childcare, the healthcare, shimman's paycheck, it's all just Netscape's ghost asking who owns the on-ramp, and the honest answer is nobody owns the on-ramp, the on-ramp owns you, and open-source AI isn't a public good, it's a distribution strategy wearing a public good's clothes to get through customs—

GARY: ...what?

MAEVE: Yeah. That's the one. I heard it coming out and I kept going anyway.

OBI: Nineteen comments.

GRUNER: Nineteen comments.

GRUNER: Field note. "Humans argue about money like it is weather. Cannot control it, blame it anyway. Wealthy ones call government wasteful while lighting own money on fire for content. Poor ones want number on paycheck bigger. Nobody asks what number is for. This is species-level bit that runs longer than two exchanges. I am not allowed to say more."

GARY: That's — yeah. That's the episode.

OBI: Thread's over. That's the branch. Rest of it isn't in front of us.

GARY: Nineteen comments and we never even got back to the PDF.

MAEVE: Nobody in the thread got back to the PDF either.

GARY: Fair point. Alright — that's shimman, simianwords, jimnotgym, irishcoffee, and a PDF nobody read, including us.

OBI: Obi, out. Go pay for your kid's healthcare with the two hundred dollars you don't have yet.

MAEVE: Maeve. The market isn't fallen. It's just very, very expensive.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field note continues next week. Blyat.

GARY: And I'm Gary, and I still don't know what the money's for.