3 quotes from 3 episodes on 20VC with Harry Stebbings, each with a timestamped link to the source.
3 quotes3 episodes
The short version
Jason Lemkin argued that enterprise market share for open-weight AI models has already reached its peak. Nobody on the floor wanted to use an open-weight model, and public evals require asterisks and daggers.
Most interesting insights
Every single AI evaluation requires asterisks and daggers beside the published results, according to Jason Lemkin.
“I found that every single eval needs like three asterisks and four daggers next to it today…”
Jason Lemkin, 20VC with Harry Stebbings · October 2026 · Watch at 31:14 ↗
Regulated enterprises refuse to deploy Chinese open-weight models like Qwen and DeepSeek due to IP, data protection, and governance barriers, turning to them only under intense cost duress.
US-built open alternatives like Reflection Beam aim to deliver near-frontier intelligence at one-third to one-fourth the price of proprietary model APIs.
Inference infrastructure providers are seeing massive valuation jumps, with Modal tripling to a $15 billion valuation and BaseTen discussing a $26 billion valuation.
Jack Altman describes "intelligence saturation" as the inflection point where cheaper open models become good enough to handle specific production tasks reliably.
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