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DOORS OPEN AT 6:30, SHOW STARTS AT 7
In July, a Chinese lab you'd probably never heard of published Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, billed as the largest open model on earth, weights posted free on Hugging Face for anyone to download. It's one of four Chinese labs that spent the last year closing the gap with the American frontier, then giving the result away. Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi. Four of the five most-used open models in the world now come out of Beijing, & American developers are running them inside hospitals, law firms, & startups because they're the cheapest, fastest tools available. No API someone in Washington controls. No off switch. Just download & go.
One camp says a model is just math. Open weights run on a consumer's machine, the code is right there to inspect, & cutting Americans off from the best tools on the planet is how you lose a technology race. The other camp says the giveaway is the strategy. China seeds the world's infrastructure with their standards, their defaults, their assumptions, & the dependency follows once switching costs become unbeatable.
So: should Americans be allowed to build on Chinese open-weight models or is this the new Cold War's Monkey's Paw?
Arguing for, Rob Li is Managing Partner of Amont Partners, a New York global equity firm that invests across the US & Asia. He has spent his career putting capital on both sides of the Pacific, from Yum China to Alibaba deals, & he thinks the country that walls itself off from the best tools available loses.
Arguing against, Will McKelvey is a Principal at Lerer Hippeau, one of New York's oldest venture firms, where he backs early-stage founders & spends his days watching for the future of AI, especially in consumer. He got his start by way of a congressional office, & he thinks the cheapest model on the market is the one you pay for slowly.
Let's get into it.
UNMUTED is the place where talking points go to die. Talk politics. Keep your friends. Make new ones.
In collaboration with COMMITTEE OF 100
Committee of 100 (C100) is a nonprofit U.S. leadership organization of distinguished Chinese Americans dedicated to advancing the full participation of Chinese Americans in American society & fostering constructive U.S.-China relations. For more than 35 years, C100 has brought together leaders across business, government, academia, technology, media, the arts, & other fields to advance its dual mission. Learn more at committee100.org.
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