What happens when Chinese labs stop shipping open models?
The Infrastructure Behind Agentic Finance, with Shashank Yadav and Greg Osuri of Akash Network (Fraction AI)
“Shouldn’t this be cheaper or free? Like, what happens when the Chinese labs stop producing state-of-the-art open source models?… Then how do you get your models? Well, you can get from Claude or OpenAI, but then you end up paying a lot of money. I think it will come a time when decentralization becomes very, very important.” — 00:34:45
Context: Arguing the economic/monetary angle for decentralized AI to a crypto-skeptical AI audience; notes younger AI engineers lack the open-source ethos because “there was no struggle” — everything appears free while monetized invisibly.