Frontier Labs Threatened by Kimi? Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models & Stripe Buys PayPal
Jul 23, 2026 · 1:27:39
Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O'Driscoll debate China's near-frontier open-weight models Kimi and Quan, arguing the US should not ban them but compete. They discuss OpenAI's 'AI Communism' tweet, the commoditized inference market leading OpenRouter to consider sale while Fireworks AI hits $1B ARR at $17.5B valuation. The panel notes the application layer has not arrived, with infrastructure spending far exceeding app revenues. They analyze the Stripe-Advent bid to take PayPal private at ~$60B, predicting a 35% premium deal. Finally, they touch on Databricks' $188B Series M, nuclear energy progress, and the strange inversion of private and public markets.
