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ML Misha Laskin On Prof G Media

“The high-level distinction: closed, you cannot own. You can only rent. Open, you can own entirely. It's like the difference between the rental and the ownership real estate market. When you are renting an apartment, you are subject to the whims of your landlord, which could mean price hikes. It could mean an eviction. But it's very convenient. You just pay rent and someone else manages your property for you.”

Prof G Media · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“The high-level distinction: closed, you cannot own. You can only rent. Open, you can own entirely. It's like the difference between the rental and the ownership real estate market. When you are renting an apartment, you are subject to the whims of your landlord, which could mean price hikes. It could mean an eviction. But it's very convenient. You just pay rent and someone else manages your property for you.” — Misha Laskin, Prof G Media

Context

Asked what 'open source' and 'open model' actually mean, the Reflection co-founder answers with a rent-versus-own analogy for closed and open AI models: an open model can be handed over on a flash drive and run on your own infrastructure.

Transcript

Prof G Media
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. Can

Ed Elson

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, but then you also inherit all the problems that come with ownership. And for various reasons, right, it makes sense to buy homes for financial reasons, for control reasons, and so forth. And you can think about open source and software and AI as really the same thing. You are either renting software or AI from someone or you're owning it yourself. And so when we think about open source, in AI, we really think about it, we think about it as…

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…

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

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