A model is just a standalone file with trillions of numbers inside that predicts the next word — it's not a server farm, not connected to the internet, and has no awareness of who runs it or where.

0:00With the recent release of very large, very capable openweight AI models from China, the world has been a buzz about who should be able to run these models, as well as should companies and citizens in the US trust these models that come from China. And with all of this, there are a ton of questions and misconceptions that arise. So, in this video, I'm going to answer these

0:21questions. Who is creating AI models? How do they create them? How do we access and run those models? What are open weight models? And if I use a Chinese model, does my data and prompts go to China? And finally, what are the real risks of using AI models we did not create? And in this video, I'm going to break all of that down. I'm going to answer these questions, clear up any

0:44misconceptions, and really, I'm trying to make this the most accessible explainer video I have ever created. Ideally, you'll be able to share this with anyone you know, even people who are non-technical, to really help them understand this wild world of AI. If that sounds good, let's dive in. My name is CJ. Welcome to Syntax. Now, first, let's set some ground rules about words and language I'll be using.

1:11When I say the word model, I'm talking about an LLM or large language model. A lot of people just call it AI or artificial intelligence, but in this video I'm going to use the word model. And a model is basically the thing you get access to when you go to chatgbt.com or gemini.google.com or cloud.ai. And a model is a standalone thing created by an AI lab. And there are AI

1:36labs all over the world, but the biggest and most capable AI labs are based in the US. And this includes OpenAI who created Chad GBT, Anthropic who created Cloud, Google DeepMind, who created Gemini, and XAI who created Grock. And the models these AI labs create are known as frontier models. That is, they're at the forefront of model creation. They have the most funding, the most resources, and some of the

2:00smartest people in the world working on AI. There are also China based AI labs like DeepSeek or Alibaba Cloud who created Quinn or Moonshot AI who created Kimmy or Zai who created GLM. Now, how do these labs create these AI models? They used incredible amounts of computing power to slowly create a model by analyzing vast amounts of data, essentially the entire internet. And this process usually takes many months

2:28and billions of dollars in hardware and electricity. But the end result of all of that analyzing and processing is a single standalone model file that essentially has internal representations of every piece of data it analyzed throughout that process. And that model file can do one thing. Predict the next word. Essentially, every interaction you have with a model happens by breaking down your prompt, predicting what word might come next in the response, then

2:55appending the predicted word back into the prompt. repeat, repeat, repeat until you get a full answer from the model. Now, it's important to note that the end result of all of that upfront analyzing all of all of that data is a single file that predicts words. It's not a server farm. It's not a computer. It's not a program running on a computer. It's a file with trillions or billions of