Episode
Can Open Models Keep Up With the AI Frontier? | Nathan Lambert
The a16z Show · Oct 14, 2026 · 1 h 00 min
a16z Partner Lisha Li sits down with AI researcher and Trillium founder Nathan Lambert to ask how durable the gap really is between frontier AI labs and open models. Nathan argues that OpenAI and Anthropic have structural advantages in compute, capital, and the ability to pioneer new training paradigms, but open-model labs, particularly in China, have proven remarkably capable of following close…