“Consider this, that there are about 5,000 people in the world that have frontier access to frontier models within the closed labs. And of those, probably 10% do safety research. So in the whole world, our whole world is being secured today by 500 people. No matter their intention, it is impossible that they'll secure these brains.”
This Week in Startups · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Laskin, a former DeepMind researcher now building open models, makes the security case for openness. He cites Linus's law that with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow, and describes AI models as "brains in a jar" with far more bugs than ordinary software.
Transcript
…can think about AI as it's like traditional software. It's much more powerful and it actually has a lot more bugs because AI is like, it's a block. You can kind of think about it. It's like brain in a jar, right? That's what these things are. Networks, their brains in jars. Brain in a jar. That's a
great description of it. Yeah.
That's basically it, right? And you either invent that brain or you own it, but it's brain in a jar. And you have to kind of probe it for, you know, all the things that it could possibly, you know, it's possibly thinking and could go wrong. And if you have, consider this, that there are about 5,000 people in the world that have frontier access to frontier models within the closed labs. And of those, probably 10% do safety research. So in the whole world, our whole world is being secured today by 500 people. No matter their intention, it is impossible that they'll secure these brains. And
this is the first time that a brain like this has been created, right? We created software before, but it wasn't quite like a brain. And so the brain and its capabilities are growing faster than the securing of the brain. It's almost like we're putting this robot into society that's hyper capable…
I think that's right. I think the every lab, I do believe at this point is genuinely, you know, or at least has pockets that are generally concerned about safety and alignment because of how powerful these systems have gotten. Now, different labs have different philosophies for how to fix this…
An encryption technology, even on the margins where people say, oh, bad guys can use encryption and whatever. Bad guys are always going to do bad guy things. But they get caught in the real world. They screw up. People give a tip on them. We do not need to sacrifice everybody's privacy on their…
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