“The fact that there are great open models out there, period, doesn't matter where they come from, is a gift to us all… If you were to take away open source models altogether because of some geopolitical worries, it would actually hurt the American innovation ecosystem.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026

Context

Ed Elson put the theory that China is "dumping" subsidized open models to undercut US AI businesses. Laskin disagrees with the premise and argues American startups have benefited by building on Chinese open models.

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Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 35:23 into the episode

Misha Laskin

First, I actually disagree with the premise of AI dumping and it's somehow being negative for the Western markets. I think.

Ed Elson

Yeah, I kind of agree as well. I'm sort of framing it. Yeah. The fact

Misha Laskin

…businesses. But right, you want a competitive ecosystem where the startups that are also building coding agents can build businesses too. And what did those startups do? Well, they actually started moving to Chinese open models, building on top of them, customizing them for their workloads, and standing up on their own two feet. So this is a gift that China gave to actually American Startup. And if you were to take away open source models altogether because of some geopolitical worries, it would actually hurt the American innovation ecosystem. So I think the first thing we have to think about is that actually this is kind of from a builder developer innovation perspective, these things are gifts and it's great. Like we could be in a world where there was no good open models and that'd be a much more worrisome, darker world to be in.

Ed Elson

Yeah.

Misha Laskin

And the other thing is that, again, there's AI is one of those, it's not kind of a fixed pie, zero something. When you drive the cost of something in this instance, like the demand goes up. It's a sort of Jevons paradox sort of thing. So when you take AI and you, so far, every time you've kind of…

Ed Elson

But some of them even have, which I've been surprised by. I'm pretty sure Microsoft was testing out DeepSeek for a moment, which I was really surprised by. I might be getting that wrong, hopefully not.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“Reinforcement learning as a problem was solved actually faster than we anticipated. We thought it would take years. It took less than a year, both within external labs, but even within our own experiments.” — Misha Laskin, Prof G Markets

“When something is not the core strategy of the company, you tend to not pay as much attention to it. And you tend to open source, you know, maybe like a lesser version of the thing that you're actually kind of monetizing. And that's kind of what we've seen from open source launches from Google… similar when OpenAI launched GPT-OSS.” — Misha Laskin, Prof G Markets