The a16z Show

E1191 - Can Open Source Keep AI Power From Concentrating?

Published: September 7, 2026

Duration: 8:30

MTS host Sophia Dew visits the Open Source AI Summit in San Francisco to ask researchers and founders across the AI stack a central question: can open source prevent AI power from concentrating in the hands of a few companies?

Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of Attention Is All You Need, argues that today’s concentration may be a feature of the current technological paradigm rather than a permanent feature of AI. Transformers reward enormous amounts of data and compute, but future breakthroughs could make smaller, more specialized models far more capable.

Across conversations with researchers and bu...