Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · 2026-07-23 · 11 min
On today’s show Ben and Andrew begin with takeaways from OpenAI’s sandboxing snafu, including a reminder that the big bad wolf is real, OpenAI’s failures, and the timing challenge with warnings from AI labs. From there: Talking through Ben’s article on Kimi K3 and the future of open weights AI models in the U.S., including why the U.S. open source market has stagnated, the motives of various tech constituencies to drive competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, the difference between the training market and the inference market, intelligence as a commodity, and why OpenAI and Anthropic may have a more defensible lead than it seems. At the end: The government’s disagreements about how to handle Chinese models, the argument for encouraging U.S. distillation, the security risks of building atop Chinese infrastructure, an email about Chinese innovation, concerns over American credentialism, and a potential curveball from the CCP after a week of Kimi anxiety. To email the show: email@sharptech.fm @SharpTechPodcast Channel - YouTube @Stratechery Channel - YouTube Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
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