Kimi K3, China’s largest open-weight AI model yet, just hit the public — and it’s rewriting the terms of the US-China AI race. In this episode, Chip Usher sits down with David Lin, Senior Director for Tech Platforms at SCSP and CIA veteran, to unpack what K3’s release really signals. They dig into how the competition has shifted from a simple US-vs-China contest into a two-axis battle of open weights vs. closed weights, why K3 dropped right alongside Xi Jinping’s World AI Conference speech, the eye-popping cost gap between K3 and frontier US models, and the question of large-scale model distillation and IP theft. They close out with a look at Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and a growing coalition of US companies pushing back against a closed-weight future. It’s a fast-moving landscape — and this conversation captures exactly where things stand today.
Four and a half months into the Iran war, what’s actually left of Iran’s nuclear program — and what would it take to keep it that way? In this episode, Chip Usher sits down with Amy McAuliffe, who recently retired from the CIA as Assistant Director for Weapons and Counter Proliferation and previously served as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Assistant Director of CIA for the Near East, to unpack where Iran’s nuclear ambitions really stand.
They dig into why Amy describes Iran’s program as “down but not out”, the uncertainty around Iran’s 60%-enriched uranium stockpile and where it may be located, and how much technical knowledge Iran has actually retained despite the loss of key nuclear scientists.
They close out with a look at how Khamenei’s death and the rise of new IRGC leadership could shift Iran’s calculus toward weaponization, what a credible future nuclear deal would need to include, and whether a purely military solution can ever fully resolve the nuclear question. It’s a fast-moving landscape — and this conversation captures exactly where things stand today.
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