Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

“They are at the frontier and driving it forward. We want that to be fundable, and be a great business model ongoing,” he told CNBC. “You want open weight models to give people freedom and access.”

To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad.”