Ball is ex-trump admin (he’s not MAGA, though, afaik, just smart) and now head of strategic futures @openai . Some observations on Kimi: It’s a very good model! I don’t think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It’s not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run. [edit: my experience as well] I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. [edit: China might just be using the US as an experimental laboratory to see what happens… they can ban / control anything very easily in China if they need to, at least at scale] Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I’m continually surprised to see the so-called “accelerationists” so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It’s not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott’s recounting of the hill people in “the art of not being governed.” Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex. [edit: legit most moronic thing Ball has said. Competition is not ‘decelerationist’. Does it require competing at a nation state level? Maybe, but that’s just sometimes how it rolls, buddy. Maybe he was thinking decelerationist to his IPO options… lulz A more generous take, perhaps: he thinks Chinese Open Models like KimiK3 specifically are going to get Open Models in general banned/regulated, which would be decelerationist, but that is not what he said.] One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a “public good” which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of “digital public infrastructure.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I’ve never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn’t ultimately concede this is where things end. You’d be surprised how many ‘accelerationists’ lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don’t know what they’re doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business. [edit: Strong ASI models, if they happen, will demand nationalization. Strong ASI will be more powerful than any government, so nationalization is the only option. Now, will Strong ASI happen? Who knows. If it doesn’t, than yeah, AI communism isn’t necessary and probably a bad idea. Strong ASI models would be a bit like a business producing Nuclear Weapons. Probably want to nationalize that. ] I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don’t need to “ban open source” (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. “A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models.” It needn’t be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don’t want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There’s a happy middle ground here. I’d assume they will do some version of this. [edit: very insightful, probably the most useful point in the entire post] It’s probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you’ll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked. [edit: lol. pretty insipid, probably the second most stupid observation in the whole post. it’s like saying the sky is blue. at least it’s not as wrong as point 3 I guess.] submitted by /u/kaggleqrdl
Originally posted by u/kaggleqrdl on r/ArtificialInteligence