“The safety, in my opinion, comes more from what we call the harness, which is how you hold the model and how you interact with the model than the model itself.”
Sidecar Sync · September 2026
Context
Co-host Mallory Mejias asks whether smaller, cheaper models are also safer than frontier ones because they are less capable. Nagarajan says that is the wrong place to look. He points to a cheap open-weights model that could still do real damage if you spun up thousands of instances with unfettered tool access, and to things like how long an agent is allowed to run as the levers that actually matter.
Transcript
…built for this sector. So we talk about it a lot, but there are other ways to do this as well. There's platforms like Databricks. You can bring data into Microsoft Fabric. There's other places that are environments where you can bring your data in. They all have their pros and cons, obviously.
…switching should be cheap. Can you help us make the case for the smaller model, Ameth? And I'm also curious, do you think, because we talk about them being smaller, faster, and cheaper, do you also think they're safer because they may not have the overall intelligence level of a frontier model?
The safety, in my opinion, comes more from what we call the harness, which is how you hold the model and how you interact with the model than the model itself. You can do really bad things with small models if you just let them run amok. You could take, you know, something like GPT OSS 120B, which was a model released in August 2025. It's not a very intelligent model. You can run it very cheaply, though. And so if you wanted to spin up hundreds or thousands of instances of this much smaller model, that model could probably do some damage if you gave it…
Another thing you can control is the autonomy of your agents. Recursive self-improvement is the thing driving the fear in a lot of the conversations. That we've had thus far. And it's a dial, not a switch that flips when you start using AI. So, Ameth, in a controlled environment, what are the…
Well, there's a lot of them, actually. And so, these different knobs or levers that exist on this machine that you're building, you have a lot of control over this. So, one of the things is actually just the budget you give to the agent. So, how long can the agent run for? If you give the agent…
That would
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