Sebastian argues that because ML researchers frequently switch jobs between labs, no company can keep a durable technological edge — competition will instead be won on compute budget and hardware access. ✦ AI generated
Sebastian Raschka · Lex Fridman · 2026-01-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 3:05
“Who's winning at the international level? Would you say it's the set of companies in China or the set of companies in the United States?”
One thing I know for sure is that I don't think nowadays, in 2026, that there will be any company that has access to technology that no other company has access to. That is mainly because researchers are frequently changing jobs and labs. They rotate. I don't think there will be a clear winner in terms of technology access.
verbatim transcript · starts at 3:05
3:05these as open models. Winning, I think, has multiple timescales to it. We have today, we have next year, we have in 10 years. One thing I know for sure is that I don't think nowadays, in 2026, that there will be any company that has access to technology that no other company has access to. That is mainly because researchers are frequently changing jobs and labs. They rotate. I don't think there will be a clear winner in terms of
3:36technology access. However, I do think there will be, The differentiating factor will be budget and hardware constraints. I don't think the ideas will be proprietary, but rather the resources needed to implement them. I don't see currently a winner-take-all scenario. I can't see that. At the moment. - Nathan, what do you think? - You see the labs put different energy into what they're trying to do, and I think to demarcate the point in time when we're recording this, the hype
4:08over Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 model has been absolutely insane, which is just... I mean, I've used it and built stuff in the last few weeks, and it's... it's almost gotten to the point where it feels like a bit of a meme in terms of the hype. And it's kind of funny because this is very organic, and then if we go back a few months ago, we can see the release date and the notes, as Gemini 3 from Google got
4:30released, and it seemed like the marketing and just, like, wow factor of that release was super high. But then at the end of November, Claude Opus 4.5 was released and the hype has been growing, but Gemini 3 was before this. And it kind of feels like people don't really talk about it as much, even though when it came out, everybody was like, this is Gemini's moment to retake Google's
4:52structural advantages in AI. And Gemini 3 is a fantastic model, and I still use it. It's just kind of differentiation is lower. And I agree with Sebastian; what you're saying with all these, the idea space is very fluid, but culturally Anthropic is known for betting very hard on code, which is the Claude Code thing, is working out for them right now. So I think that even if the ideas flow pretty freely, so much of this is