# Open models can balance the power of frontier labs

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/open-models-can-balance-the-power-of-frontier-labs/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Andrej Karpathy](https://realalpha.app/builders/andrej-karpathy/) · Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and engineer. · Joined Anthropic's pretraining team; founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native school, after leading Tesla's Autopilot AI.
- Host: [Sarah Guo](https://realalpha.app/people/sarah-guo/) · Founder, Conviction · Ex-Greylock partner; early investor in Cognition, Harvey and Mistral.
- Show: No Priors
- Episode: [Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/), Mar 20, 2026
- Moment: 48:48 to 54:20 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/open-models-can-balance-the-power-of-frontier-labs/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=2928

## Quote

> “I want there to be a thing that's behind and that is kind of like a **common working space** for intelligences that the entire industry has access to.”
> — [Andrej Karpathy](https://realalpha.app/builders/andrej-karpathy/) at [52:15](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3135) · No Priors

## Takeaways

1. Open models can serve many consumer and business needs.
2. Frontier models may focus on the hardest, most valuable tasks.
3. A shared open platform offers a check on centralization.

## About this segment

Andrej Karpathy expects closed models to remain ahead while open models cover more basic uses. He sees an open, shared platform as a counterweight to concentrated control of advanced AI.

From “Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI”, Mar 20, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[48:54](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=2934) One question related to what visibility does the world or the AI ecosystem have into the frontier is like how close open source is to the frontier and how sustainable that is. I think it is quite surprising, the entire sequence of events, actually, from having a handful of Chinese models and global models, and I think people are going to continue releasing here in the near term, that are closer than much of the industry anticipated from a capability perspective.

[49:26](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=2966) I don't know if you're surprised by that, but you're a long-term contributor to open source. What's your prediction here? Yeah, so roughly speaking, basically, the closed models are ahead, but people are monitoring the number of months that open source models are behind. And it started with, there's nothing. And then it went to 18 months. Yeah, there's been a convergence, right? So maybe they're behind by like, what is the latest?

[49:45](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=2985) Maybe like eight months, six months, eight months kind of thing right now. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of open source, obviously. So for example, in operating systems, you have like Windows and Mac OS. These are large software projects, kind of like what LLMs are going to become. And there's Linux. But Linux is very easy. Like actually, Linux is extremely successful. It runs on the vast majority of computers.

[50:02](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3002) Like last time I checked, was it like 60% or something? Like run Linux. And that's because there is a need in the industry to have a common open platform that everyone feels sort of safe using. I would say like the industry has always felt a demand for that kind of a project to exist. And I think the same is true now. And that's why businesses actually want, there's demand for this kind of a thing to exist.

[50:22](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3022) The big difference is that everything is capital. There's a lot of capex that goes into this. So I think that's where things like Fall Apart a little bit make it a bit harder to to compete in certain sense uh i do think that the current models are very good the other thing that i think is like really interesting is that for the vast majority of like consumer use cases and things like that even the term open source models are actually quite good i would say and i think like if you go forward like more uh more years it does seem to me like a huge amount of like simple use cases are going to be well covered and actually even run locally um but there's going to be always like some demand for like frontier intelligence And that can actually be an extremely large piece of the pie.

[50:59](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3059) But it could be that the need for frontier intelligence is going to be like, you know, Nobel Prize kind of work. Or like, let's move Linux from C to Rust. There's going to be like bigger projects, you know, like scoped in that kind of a way. And there's going to be maybe more. And maybe that's where a lot of the frontier closed intelligences are going to be interacting with. And open source is kind of like going to eat through a lot of the more basic use cases or something like that.

[51:23](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3083) you know at some point what is frontier today is going to be you know probably later this year what's frontier today in terms of what i'm using right now from the closed labs might be open source and that's going to be doing a lot of work so i kind of expect that this dynamic will actually basically continue like we'll have frontier labs that have closed um ais that are kind of like these oracles and then we'll have open source kind of like behind for some amount of months and i kind of expect that to uh to continue and i actually think that's like a pretty pretty good set up uh overall um because i i'm a little bit hesitant of having um i don't actually think it's like structurally i think there's some systemic risk attached to just having intelligences that are closed and that's like that's it and i think that that's a you know centralization has a very

[52:03](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3123) poor track record in my view uh in the past and has you mean like in political or economic systems in general yes exactly i think there's like a lot of like an eastern european yeah a lot of It's a pretty bad person. So I want there to be a thing that is maybe not at the edge of capability because it's new and unexplored, et cetera, but I want there to be a thing that's behind and that is kind of like a common working space for intelligences that the entire industry has access to.

[52:27](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3147) Yeah, that seems to me like a pretty decent power balance for the industry. Yeah. I also think there's just like, there are many problems to solve, right? Like if you keep advancing intelligence from the frontier, we can do new things. And there are a lot of like very big problems for humanity. Right. And so like, it seems that that will continue to be a very expensive game. And so I want to like root for labs that are doing that because there are problems we cannot solve without continuing to advance the models in a very expensive way.

[52:52](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3172) And yet, as you point out, if what we have today as Frontier is open, that's a lot of capability, right? And so I think the power of that or the democratization of that seems very useful and also healthy. Yeah. I think basically by accident, we're actually in an okay spot. An optimal spot, yeah. By accident, we happen to be in a good spot in a certain sense. Well, and to some degree, the longer this endures, like this dynamic, the healthier of a spot, like the ecosystem might be in, right?

[53:24](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3204) Because you have more and more area under the curve. And I will say that even on the closed side, I almost feel like it's been like even further centralizing recently because I think a lot of the front runners are like not necessarily like the top tier. And so, yeah, like in that sense, I think it's not super ideal. I would love there to be more frontier labs because yeah i'm like by default very suspicious of like um i want there to be more people in the room i want i think like in machine learning ensembles always are perform any individual model and so i want there to be ensembles of people thinking about all the hardest problems and i want there to be ensembles of people in a room when they um to be all well informed and to make all those decisions you know so i don't want it to be like a closed doors with two people

[54:02](https://realalpha.app/v/kwSVtQ7dziU/?t=3242) or three people i feel like that's like not a good not a good future i almost wish like there more labs is long story short. And I do think that open source has a place to play. I hope it sticks around. And I basically, it's currently slightly behind and that's actually kind of like