“Closed, you cannot own. You can only rent. Open, you can own entirely. So it's kind of like the difference between the rental and the ownership real estate market. When you are renting an apartment, you don't actually own it, right? You are subject to the whims of your landlord, which could mean price hikes. It could mean an eviction.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026

Context

Ed Elson asked what open source actually means in AI and how it differs from closed. Laskin, CEO of Reflection, answers with a rent-versus-own analogy. It frames the whole open-weight debate as a question of control.

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Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 07:35 into the episode

Misha Laskin

…And it's extremely important for America as a country to be competitive and not just competitive, but have the best open source software and models when it comes to AI and ensure that our allies that the world and domestically, we all build on our own open intelligence. So we saw that coming.

Ed Elson

Can I just interrupt for one moment? What actually is what does open source mean? What does it mean to be an open model? When you describe Linux, which is open source, what is the difference between open source versus closed source?

Misha Laskin

The high-level distinction, closed, you cannot own. You can only rent. Open, you can own entirely. So it's kind of like the difference between the rental and the ownership real estate market. When you are renting an apartment, you don't actually own it, right? You are subject to the whims of your landlord, which could mean price hikes. It could mean an eviction. It could mean all sorts of things, but it's very convenient. You just pay rent and someone else manages your property for you. You don't really have to worry about fixing the, you know, when the pipes are leaking or something like that, right? You call, you ask your landlord and they figure it out. On the other hand, in real estate, there's the ownership market, right, which is you buy a house…

Ed Elson

My understanding, which I don't think fully aligns with the analogy, is that an element of open source and the open models is that they're free. It's, I mean, when you buy a home and you own a home, you've got to pay money to buy the home. But with open source models, my understanding is anyone can…

Misha Laskin

No, I think you're right. But it's kind of like, what would be the analogy here? The model may be free, even though some models choose to license. So you can have an open model that someone can own that has a license attached to it, right? And that's, you know, Meta's latest model, Muse, has a…

Ed Elson

Would it make sense then to say that for the open, the open models, and one thing I'll also would be helpful as a clarification on the difference between open weight and open source? Open weight is the new terminology that we are hearing in the AI world. And it's not totally clear what the…

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More from Prof G Markets

“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