Goldman CIO: Don't rule out open models
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Goldman Sachs' chief information officer Marco Argenti says companies shouldn't rule out the use of open-weight models, so long as they follow a set of safeguards he shared exclusively with Axios.
The big picture: Argenti is adding his voice to a growing list of executives supporting open-weight models.
What they're saying: If safeguards are properly followed, businesses, including banks, should have "enough guarantees to essentially run any model, regardless of where they come from," Argenti told Axios.
- "I don't think a priori we should block access to any model," and instead we should ask "under which conditions could I run any model, including the Chinese models," he added.
- Goldman's current open-model usage is "mostly or exclusively" U.S.-based, Argenti said.
- The bank has experimented with several U.S.-based open models and uses some for commercial workloads.
Why it matters: The Trump administration has not made its voluntary framework for AI public, but a source tells Axios that it excludes open models.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios have recently posted in support of American open-source AI, Axios' Maria Curi writes.
Argenti's proposed approach borrows two concepts from cybersecurity: "zero trust," or assuming a model could already be compromised, and "defense in depth," or putting several independent layers of protection between the model and a company's systems.
- He breaks that into four layers: model testing and certification, secure inference environments, tightly monitored agent permissions and controlled access to enterprise data.
- Goldman already applies part of that philosophy: Its AI systems don't get direct access to underlying data sources, Argenti said, instead going through the bank's data platform, which enforces access controls.
Zoom out: Argenti's view comes amid a groundswell of support for the open ecosystem, including from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and dozens of other tech companies. Nvidia just endorsed open source with its $13 billion purchase of Hugging Face.
- The U.S. should measure its AI competitiveness by the strength of its open ecosystem as well as its closed frontier labs, Argenti said, calling the two "equally important."
- Most companies are primarily model-agnostic at this point in the deployment of AI models, avoiding vendor lock-in while the best models for each task and business type are still being determined.
How it works: Open models can give companies more control and choice because the weights of the model can be adapted.
- These models can be specialized for narrow tasks, potentially producing frontier-like performance at a fraction of the cost.
- They can also be better from an enterprise IP perspective because companies can run them on infrastructure they control.
The bottom line: "We want to be in a position to have choice without adding risk," Argenti said.
- With enough layers of defense, he argues, companies should be able to run "essentially any model" without materially increasing risk.
