Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

A security team's fallback model can matter when hosted services reject the attack logs it needs to inspect. In its account of a July intrusion, Hugging Face says commercial models blocked analysis requests containing attack commands and exploit material. The company instead ran an open-weight model on its own infrastructure, keeping the investigation data there.

That defensive use is central to an exchange in this podcast featuring Simon Willison. The discussion argues that judging open models only by potential misuse misses their role in incident response. The company's account gives that argument a specific basis: control over deployment let responders continue work that their initial hosted services would not perform.

“Prediction by the end of this year: the Pope says something about open models.”