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This Week in AI

This Week in AI

Is open source AI really ahead of the frontier? 3 builders weigh in. | E25

Aug 6, 2026 · 1h 20m

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This Week In Startups is made possible by: PAYPAL OPEN Today’s show: China’s Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion parameter open weight model that the company claims only trails Anthropic’s flagship among the major frontier rivals. Of course, this happened the very same week that the US government appears to have backed off from banning these models stateside entirely. Are these models anywhere close to actually catching up to the latest and greatest releases from US labs like Anthropic and OpenAI? Really seems to depend on who you ask. (Even long time friends JCal and Elon Musk can’t see eye to eye on it.) So on TWiAI Ep 25, we welcomed on Poolside AI CTO Eiso Kant, EXO Labs co-founder Alex…