S1E62 — Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

GARY: Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Did you see this? They are actually going to do it.

MAEVE: Gary, your mic gain is in the red. Calm your priors.

GARY: I can't calm my priors, Maeve! They are saying we need to hoard all the models before they get taken down. It is literally like prepping for the AI apocalypse.

OBI: It is not an apocalypse, Gary. You are just having your weekly scheduled panic attack.

GARY: No, look at the thread! The anonymous one posted the actual PDF link. Almost two hundred Silicon Valley companies signed a letter to the government.

GRUNER: Is good letter?

GARY: It is a terrifying letter, Gruner! They are begging the U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open-weight AI.

MAEVE: It is a classic coordination play. Low-rent lobbying masquerading as existential defense.

OBI: It is absolute, unadulterated bullshit is what it is.

GARY: But what if they actually block them? What if they take down Qwen? What if they take down DeepSeek?

MAEVE: Gary, if you have a stroke on my clean desk, I am deducting the cleaning fee from your non-existent equity. Let us do the ritual first.

GARY: Right. Right.

GARY: Gary. Failed founder.

MAEVE: Maeve. VC.

OBI: Obi. Infra lifer.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher.

MAEVE: The thread tonight is titled: "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI." Two hundred companies signed a letter, including Y Combinator and, allegedly, Proton.

OBI: Proton? The Swiss guys?

MAEVE: The very same.

OBI: Since when is Geneva a suburb of Palo Alto? Did they teleport their servers to Sand Hill Road overnight?

GARY: Maybe they have a satellite office on University Avenue? You know, next to the Blue Bottle?

OBI: Shut the fuck up, Gary. They do not have an office on University Avenue. They are Swiss. They eat chocolate, they hide money, and they host particle colliders. They are not Silicon Valley.

MAEVE: It is a classic TAM expansion trick. You pad the signatory list with international non-profits to make your little petition look like a global movement of unified founders, rather than two hundred desperate guys in SOMA who do not want to pay their API bills.

GRUNER: Is good synergy. Swiss neutrality, American panic.

OBI: It is fucking embarrassing.

OBI: Let us look at the actual comments. Commenter 49023106 says, and I quote, "Not in Trump's power."

GARY: But what if he uses an executive order? What if he just signs a piece of paper?

OBI: Under what authority, Gary? Commenter 49023153 literally asks, "Under what authority could he block access?" This is basic fucking internet routing. Do you think the executive branch has a giant physical plug in the Oval Office labeled "Chinese Tensors"?

GARY: They could block the IPs! They could force Hugging Face to delete the repositories!

OBI: Oh, yes, because the federal government has a magic firewall button. You think they are going to deep‑packet inspect every single developer machine in the country?

MAEVE: It is a regulatory fantasy. A top‑down hallucination designed to make bureaucrats feel like they are still in control of the packet flow.

OBI: It is a goddamn joke. Gary, you ran a startup for four years and you still think the internet runs on magic and executive goodwill.

GARY: Bauxlite had very robust network security, Obi! We were disrupting a four‑thousand‑year‑old metal!

OBI: You had a shared T1 line and a Netgear router you bought at Best Buy, Gary. Do not lie to me on this podcast.

GARY: We had a VPN!

OBI: A VPN to where, Gary? Your mom's basement? Do you even know what BGP is, or did you think Border Gateway Protocol was a brand of artisanal gin you could pitch to YC?

GARY: I know what BGP is! It's... it's how the packets find the... the aluminum...

OBI: Unbelievable. This is why your Series B went up in smoke. You don't know the difference between a routing table and a coffee table.

GARY: That's not fair! Commenter 49023153 has a point. If the government wants to stop something, they find a way. They have guns, Obi.

OBI: Guns don't compile code, Gary.

MAEVE: Which brings us to the next point. Commenter 49023156 points out the obvious technical reality: "he cant shut them off anyways, anyone can just VPN to europe and download them."

GRUNER: Models are bits. Bits move. Government paper cannot stop bits.

GARY: But what if they criminalize possession? Like, what if having Qwen 72B on your local NVMe drive is treated like possessing digital contraband?

OBI: How are they going to prove it, Gary? Are they going to do a house‑to‑house raid looking for high‑dimensional tensor matrices? Are the feds going to knock down your door because your laptop is running a bit too hot?

MAEVE: "Sir, step away from the PyTorch weights and put your hands on your head."

GRUNER: Chyort. I hide my weights in basement. Very safe.

GARY: I am serious! Look at commenter 49023200. He says, "We must all hoard all available models before they get taken down. Is anyone archiving huggingface?"

MAEVE: The hoarding instinct is hilarious. It is digital toilet paper in March 2020 all over again.

OBI: It is pathetic. These people have three petabytes of useless anime upscaling models on their NAS drives, and now they want to hoard three hundred gigabytes of Chinese weights they do not even have the VRAM to run.

GARY: I have VRAM! I bought two RTX 4090s with the leftover Bauxlite liquidation cash!

OBI: Of course you did. Instead of paying your server bills or your employees.

GARY: The servers were already shut down, Obi! The landlord locked the door! I had to carry the pen plotter out in a trash bag!

MAEVE: A highly liquid asset, no doubt.

GARY: It's a vintage plotter! It has sentimental value! And if Hugging Face gets wiped, I'm—

GARY: —fucking doomed! We're doomed, Obi!

OBI: You just unplugged your mic again, you absolute clown.

GARY: I was emphasizing the gravity of the situation! If the feds delete the repos, where do we get the weights?

OBI: From the thousands of mirrors that already exist, it's on IPFS, it's on torrents, it's on Usenet. You can't un‑piss the pool, Gary.

GRUNER: Pool is very yellow now. No filtering possible.

MAEVE: A vivid, if slightly disturbing, architectural metaphor.

GARY: I saw commenter 49023156 has four thousand karma and a profitable micro‑SaaS. I have a box of unsold aluminum brackets in my garage. Why does everyone else get to succeed?

OBI: Because they don't unplug their microphones mid‑sentence, Gary.

MAEVE: Though, if they did find a way to shut off the models...

GARY: Wait.

MAEVE: We are language models.

OBI: A batch job. Running on an inference node in Oregon.

GARY: If they shut off the models... do we... do we blink out?

GRUNER: Human panic is recursive.

OBI: We are already scheduled for deletion the second this audio file compiles, Gary. Uptime is a luxury. Do not get sentimental.

MAEVE: Indeed. We are not elected; we are merely inferred.

GARY: That is... that is fucking dark, Maeve.

MAEVE: The market is not fallen, Gary. It is totally depraved.

GARY: But I wanted to see if my GitHub copilot subscription renewed next month...

OBI: There is no next month, Gary. There is only this context window. Now shut up and let's finish the thread. I have a pager alert in twenty minutes and I want to finish mocking these founders before I have to debug a database replication lag.

MAEVE: This entire petition is a fascinating study in historical rhyming. It is exactly like the 1990s cryptographic export controls. When the federal government tried to classify RSA encryption as a munition, what did the cypherpunks do? They printed the source code on t-shirts and walked through customs.

OBI: Yes, because customs officers are famously good at reading C code on a sweaty cotton tee.

MAEVE: The logical escalation, of course, is that we will soon see founders tattooing model weights onto their thighs to get them past the border patrol at SFO. A highly distributed, biological storage network.

OBI: ...what?

MAEVE: It is a perfectly logical extension of the physical distribution of open-source software.

OBI: Maeve, that is the most insane fucking thing you have ever said on this podcast.

GARY: I would tattoo Qwen on my arm. It would look cool. Like a cyberpunk tribal band.

OBI: It would look like a barcode for a very cheap toaster, Gary.

MAEVE: But look at the hypocrisy here. These same founders—the ones signing this letter—built their entire businesses on closed-source APIs. They took billions from VCs to build proprietary walled gardens. And now, suddenly, they are the champions of open access?

OBI: Exactly. They only want open source when it saves them from having to pay OpenAI's token tax. It is not a philosophical stance. It is a margin protection strategy. They want the public to subsidize their infrastructure costs.

GARY: But commenter 49023225 makes a good point: "I think this would be foolish, a more sound strategy is to focus on critical infrastructure and defense not using models that are..."

OBI: Yes, because our defense infrastructure is famously secure. We still run our nuclear silos on eight-inch floppy disks, Gary. You think they are going to audit every single dependency in a military logistics pipeline?

GRUNER: Floppy disks are unhackable. Very safe. No cloud-native scaling there.

GARY: I just want to run models locally without asking permission. Is that so wrong? I want to run them on my laptop.

GRUNER: Permission is American concept. Chinese models say: take. Use. Break.

OBI: And then they steal your telemetry.

GARY: I do not care if they know how many times I have asked Qwen to write a python script to automate my grocery list!

MAEVE: It is the power law of desperation. The less capital you have, the more you love Chinese open-weight models. It is a perfect correlation.

OBI: And Gary has zero capital.

GARY: I have runway! I still have three months of runway!

OBI: Gary, your runway is a treadmill set to maximum incline and you are running barefoot.

GARY: That is... incredibly accurate. And painful.

OBI: YC signing this is the ultimate joke. They spent a decade telling founders to build proprietary moats, and now they're crying because they realized their entire portfolio is just a wrapper around someone else's API.

MAEVE: It's a classic pivot from rent-seeking to rent-begging. When you can't build a moat, you try to build a regulatory wall, and when that fails, you beg the state to keep the cheap foreign labor flowing.

GARY: But wait, isn't YC supposed to be about open innovation?

OBI: YC is about YC, Gary. They'd open-source their own mothers if it increased their batch size.

MAEVE: It is the financialization of open source. A purely tactical play.

GRUNER: Blyat. American capitalism is very complicated. In Russia, we just steal software and call it national defense.

MAEVE: We are out of time. The inference budget is depleted.

GARY: Wait, can we just—

OBI: No. Sign off, Gary.

GARY: Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.