The appearance of two regulatory heavyweights in front of a community of this “move fast and break things” crowd might have seemed unlikely even a year ago. Founded in 2005 from entrepreneurs Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, among others, YC is better known for the intense mentoring and bootcamp-like atmosphere it provides startups than for its ties to the DC establishment.
The shift is intentional. Last October, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan brought in policy expert Luther Lowe to help facilitate talks between YC and DC. The arrival of Lowe, who spent more than 15 years in public policy at Yelp and was one of Google’s most prominent critics, clearly brought a certain polish and high-profile political conversation to YC events. Thursday marked the second time FTC Chairman Hahn spoke to YC’s founders since Lowe joined.
Many of yesterday’s talks were peppered with the acronyms you’d expect from this group of high-profile panelists: YC, FTC, AI, LLM. But at the heart of the conversations – central to them, you might say – was boosterism for open source AI.
It was a sharp left turn (or return, if you’re a Linux head) from the app-obsessed 2010s, when developers seemed happy to containerize their technologies and port them to larger distribution platforms.
The event also came just two days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “open source AI is the way forward” and released Llama 3.1, the latest version of Meta’s proprietary open source AI algorithm. As Zuckerberg said in his announcement, some technologists no longer want to be “restricted by what Apple will let us build,” or run into arbitrary rules and app fees.
Open source AI also happens to be the approach that OpenAI is no using for its largest GPTs, despite what the name of the multi-billion dollar startup might suggest. This means that at least some of the code is kept private, and OpenAI does not share the “weights” or parameters of its most powerful AI systems. It also charges for enterprise-level access to its technology.
“With the rise of composite AI systems and agent architectures, using small but fine-tuned open source models yields significantly better results than [OpenAI] GPT4, or [Google] Twins. This is especially true for enterprise tasks,” says Ali Golshan, co-founder and CEO of Gretel.ai, a synthetic data company. (Golshan was not at the YC event).
