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Using a closed proprietary model API means suffering the control and moderation tradeoffs, so for trusted use cases people will go with open-weight models by default because that is where they can control their own guardrails.

Simon argues that closed model APIs have arbitrary and difficult-to-enforce guardrails with frequent false positives, citing Hugging Face using a Chinese open-weight model to contain an attack and Infract developers switching from Claude to Kimi K3 after false-positive safety triggers. He predicts people will turn to open-weight models by default for trusted use cases. ✦ AI generated

Simon Mo · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-06 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 32:11

In the end is about all the closed proprietary model API. their guard rails are a little bit arbitrary but also very difficult to enforce... So if moderation is never solved which is going to be very very hard then there's always a place where you have a model where you know and trust that you are publishing to and be be able to use from... in the future also see for the trusted use case people will go to open way by default because that is where you know for sure that uh the guardrail is uh lessened or you can control your guardrail for trusted use cases...

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32:10something like that? And can you just first I mean walk us through your impressions and understanding of what happened and then kind of what what you think the the takeaways there are. >> Yeah, like this kind of goes back to our previous point about control. So for the huggy face incident, they break it down pretty care uh pretty pretty well on their website and blog. So really thank

32:31for their transparency there. In the end is about all the closed proprietary model API. their guard rails are a little bit arbitrary but also very difficult to enforce. That means they have so much false positive in the guard rails that will have legitimate use cases just being blocked and this is like a evergreen problem even in the social media days like how do you uh design content filters uh correctly and

32:58like be able to do the moderation correctly. So if moderation is never solved which is going to be very very hard then there's always a place where you have a model where you know and trust that you are publishing to and be be able to use from. So hugging face they have to use open way model but in the future also see for the trusted use case people will go to open way by

33:22default because that is where you know for sure that uh the guardrail is uh lessened or you can control your guardrail for trusted use cases even for us like this actually apply to us today uh where uh a lot of the anthropic model do are banning frontier AI research and then when we're studying GPU kernels even as a invalid memory access error we are triggering the the red line and so a

33:51lot of our developer within infra and for VLM and are like retreating from using Fable 5 because you you have a two-hour job and you trigger the the red line which is false positive and then you have to lose all of your work and so a lot of our developer are using like Kimmy K3 today even just uh making sure because it's similar quality and it has

34:14a uh guardrail that makes sense to us. There it goes. We're using it. >> I think your social media analogy is a really apt one. >> Yeah. >> Cuz like in both in both cases, what's kind of happened is you've taken like distributed human activity and kind of centralized it in one place. Like like before social media, people talked to each other, right? And published articles and like messaged each other on

34:36message boards. But then you centralize it all under one kind of like profit-seeking enterprise and all of a sudden the incentives change like a lot, right? And we we have a specific carveout for social media which is you're not responsible for what people say on your platform. >> And that allowed the moderation problem to be tractable, I think, right? It's like, okay, we're going to do our best

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