Tim O’Reilly has spent decades measuring the worth of a company, a person, or a society by a single yardstick: create more value than you capture. Now he is applying that metric to artificial intelligence, and he does not like what he sees. In a conversation with Wired’s Steven Levy, O’Reilly argued that the biggest AI labs are building an architecture of control rather than an architecture of freedom and participation, and he made the case for a much broader vision of open source AI.
“First, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing,” O’Reilly said. “When most people talk about open-source AI, they’re really just talking about open-weight models. It’s much bigger than that. In the ’90s, when everybody else was focused on open-source licenses, I was like, ‘No, no, it’s about the architecture of the system. Does it enable participation?'”
The big labs, in O’Reilly’s view, are reading the future wrong. They have told themselves a narrative where having the biggest, best model is the key to the future. But big models like Claude are optimizing for particular use cases, and those are not necessarily the use cases people want. “I want to embed my own special sauce,” he said. “The most important thing is having a clean separation between the model, the harness, and the application. And right now we’re not getting that. They built an architecture of control rather than an architecture of freedom and participation, so they have the ability to track you.”
When Levy asked whether it is against the interests of big companies to give up control, O’Reilly was blunt. “Oh, it’s totally against their interests. But that doesn’t mean that they’re making the right strategic decision.” He argued that the latest and greatest models used to be better for everything, but now they are better for some things and worse for others. “People are talking a lot about how Fable and Sol are worse writers than the lower-level models,” he said. (Anthropic and OpenAI would disagree.) “The breakthroughs that we’re getting in so-called frontier AI are actually pushing us further away from what ordinary people are going to need. We could win frontier AI here in the US, and China will kick our ass because they have lower-level models diffused widely through society. The goal is to give people the ability to innovate freely, to paint outside the lines.”
Levy raised the concern that open source software can be a security risk, as bad actors could jump the frontier model’s guardrails. O’Reilly responded that all of the cybersecurity incidents we have seen are from the frontier models. “So risks like cybersecurity and the ability to develop pathogens are actually an argument for slowing down the frontier models more than an argument for restricting open-weight models,” he said.
Does that mean the AI powers will no longer be dominant? O’Reilly said he does not predict the future, but he believes the world is proceeding the way he hoped it would. He compared big frontier models to mainframes or supercomputers, aimed at really hard problems that are not actually the thing that gets diffused throughout society. He pointed to people building things like Pi, an open source agentic harness. At his nonprofit, the AI Disclosures Project, he is working on the idea of an open memory consortium. “Mark Zuckerberg’s thesis is, he’s going to lock you in because Meta will give you the AI that knows you best,” O’Reilly said. “The open-source vision needs to say no to this. Open source can give you the ability to switch models, switch providers, and maintain all the context that it needs.”
Levy then brought up O’Reilly’s recent Economist piece about Elon Musk and other tech leaders having so much power in their companies that they are anticapitalist, in the sense that their desires, rather than the marketplace, determine strategy. O’Reilly agreed that Silicon Valley has generally become anticapitalist. “They use the language of markets. But around 2010, the whole model came into play with Uber and Lyft. Funded by VCs, they literally spent billions of dollars to subsidize rides. The venture capitalists picked the winner rather than the market. That became the template. All the capital piles on and chokes out other possible paths.”
Levy observed that in AI, all the money is funneling into a few companies, but none seem to have a lock. O’Reilly called that a failed model. “The real action is open source. Just like in the early 1990s, when everybody thought it was all a battle for who ruled the PC, and then the web came out of left field while nobody was paying attention. I think that the real AI future will be a ferment of innovation that’s not being funded by venture capital, in the same way that the web wasn’t funded by VCs.”
The conversation turned to O’Reilly’s own company, built on books and writing. He acknowledged that the book business has been in decline for 25 years. At its peak, the company’s book business was maybe $70 million, and it is now $30 million. As books generated less revenue, he said, they had to find a way to compensate people for sharing their knowledge, because that is their fundamental business. “So now AI comes along and hoovers everything up. Can we build a set of tools that help people with that? Being able to invoke the knowledge of experts is a superpower, and we have to figure out what that looks like now.”
Levy said that when he edits the interview, he will boil down their long conversation to a shorter one, but he will not use AI to do it, and the introduction will be all his. “It’s actually our policy,” he said. O’Reilly responded, “I think that’s a legacy thing that’s going to go. My ability to have a thought partner in AI when I’m writing is very powerful.” Levy explained that he uses AI for brainstorming and functional writing, and when he interviews someone for an hour, he tells the AI, “Turn it into something I can use,” adding, “I don’t have the time to write up all those interviews.”
When asked whether he worries that AI will eventually supplant human writing, O’Reilly said AI is literally a medium, in the same way written words, paint, or music are mediums. “When I talk to an AI or design art with it, I get something different out of it than you do, in the same way that Michelangelo and Van Gogh got completely different things out of paint.” He compared the idea that you cannot write with AI to the idea that you cannot make a good portrait or landscape with a camera. “There will be people who are masters at expressing their ideas by summoning words from LLMs. People used to ride horses. Now, few do. We’re in the early days.”
For O’Reilly, the real AI future lies not in the race to build ever larger frontier models, but in the open source ferment that allows people to innovate freely. As he put it, the goal is to give people the ability to innovate freely and paint outside the lines, and the early days of this new medium are just beginning.
