Mark Soares

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Open-weight models are inherently accelerationist, because they enable far more progress than closed-weight ones.

Some observations on Kimi: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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.

Twitter replies are full of folks who think we should just give up and die rather than try to stop AI. The defeatism is almost funny, in light of recent events.

I’m afraid to tell you that it is effectively impossible to do the kind of writing I used to do on this website, not because anyone at OpenAI censors me but because of the sheer volume of hostility I get for sharing my analysis as a frontier lab employee. I enjoyed writing quick takes on this website for one basic reason: I could get rapid feedback on my own ideation process in real time. Post the early version of the take here, see the criticism; then refine, sharpen, and repeat. Unfortunately now that feature of this site is gone, because the feedback I get is now almost exclusively colored by resentment at the fact that I work at a frontier lab or other forms of hatred for my employer. The feedback signal is essentially useless now, so writing on here is not fruitful for me anymore. Literally everything I write now is responded to with “of course you said that because .” I am truly just writing what I think and would have written anyway, but everyone reads what I say in the shrieking tone of “this is what openai thinks!!!!” (to be clear, my posts are not what openai thinks). This is an unpleasant and more importantly unproductive pattern for me. I anticipate that the shape of this account will change significantly as a result. I do not currently know how. It will not become a LinkedIn feed. It will change in some other way. It will no longer be a real-time accounting of my own thinking as it develops, since this is precisely the thing that seems impossible to do now. That will have to shift to private channels.

Like this is a total squonk right here

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