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On October 25, 2026, a video was released of Nathan Lambert's guest lecture for the Harvard CS 2881R "AI Safety" course. In the lecture, he reviewed the current state of open-source models, arguing that Chinese open-source models lead comprehensively in three areas—performance, download counts, and paper citations—and that US open-source models lag China by 3 to 4 months. He also judged that distillation is not the key issue, that the combined compute of the top five US labs averages 16 times that of the top five Chinese labs, and pointed out that banning open source is not feasible in reality and would only suppress economic activity. Currently, the lecture content is publicly available as a video, with no further developments yet.
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Oct 25
Shao Meng
Nathan Lambert's Harvard lecture video released: Chinese open-source models lead, US compute advantage about 16x
The guest lecture video by Nathan Lambert for Harvard CS 2881R "AI Security" has been released. He surveys the state of open-source models and argues that Chinese open-source models lead comprehensively across three dimensions—performance, downloads, and paper citations—while US open-source models lag China by another 3 to 4 months. He judges that distillation is not the key issue, that the total compute of the top five US labs averages 16 times that of the top five Chinese labs, and points out that banning open source is unfeasible in practice and would only suppress economic activity.