Open Models Change The Economics of AI

Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing. Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year. In this episode of the Lightcone, Jeff joins us to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two years of searching for the right idea to building one of the most widely used AI developer tools in the world. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 — Intro 01:16 — Who's Actually Using Open Models? 02:13 — Is It All About Cost? 03:31 — The Token Usage Explosion 05:31 — Fine Tuning: Hype Cycle or Here to Stay? 07:27 — Where Open Models Beat Claude 08:26 — Launching Models at Scale 11:31 — Olama as the OS Layer 13:58 — Hidden Layers Between Model and App 17:28 — Open vs. Closed: The Steady State 20:41 — Local vs. Cloud Models 23:12 — Why Chinese Models Dominate Cloud 24:00 — NVIDIA's Open Source Play 26:03 — The Return to Local 27:15 — Getting GPUs Is Hard 29:16 — The Flash Model Revolution 31:35 — God Model vs. Orchestration 33:37 — The Geopolitics Question 36:14 — From Docker to Ollama 37:12 — Applied to YC With the Wrong Idea 40:36 — Lost in the Wilderness for Two Years 42:15 — The Pivot That Changed Everything 44:49 — 100K GitHub Stars, No Revenue 47:40 — How Do You Monetize Open Source? 49:43 — Why Do YC as a Second-Time Founder? 51:49 — What Seeing "Good" Actually Does for You 53:38 — Old DevOps Rules That Don't Apply Anymore

Jeffrey MorganguestGarry TanhostJared FriedmanhostHarj Taggarhost

Sep 4, 202657mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: September 4, 2026
Duration: 57m
Channel: Y Combinator
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing. Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year. In this episode of the Lightcone, Jeff joins us to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two years of searching for the right idea to building one of the most widely used AI developer tools in the world. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 — Intro 01:16 — Who's Actually Using Open Models? 02:13 — Is It All About Cost? 03:31 — The Token Usage Explosion 05:31 — Fine Tuning: Hype Cycle or Here to Stay? 07:27 — Where Open Models Beat Claude 08:26 — Launching Models at Scale 11:31 — Olama as the OS Layer 13:58 — Hidden Layers Between Model and App 17:28 — Open vs. Closed: The Steady State 20:41 — Local vs. Cloud Models 23:12 — Why Chinese Models Dominate Cloud 24:00 — NVIDIA's Open Source Play 26:03 — The Return to Local 27:15 — Getting GPUs Is Hard 29:16 — The Flash Model Revolution 31:35 — God Model vs. Orchestration 33:37 — The Geopolitics Question 36:14 — From Docker to Ollama 37:12 — Applied to YC With the Wrong Idea 40:36 — Lost in the Wilderness for Two Years 42:15 — The Pivot That Changed Everything 44:49 — 100K GitHub Stars, No Revenue 47:40 — How Do You Monetize Open Source? 49:43 — Why Do YC as a Second-Time Founder? 51:49 — What Seeing "Good" Actually Does for You 53:38 — Old DevOps Rules That Don't Apply Anymore

SPEAKERS

Jeffrey Morgan
guest
Co-founder and CEO of Ollama, previously worked at Docker/VMware building developer tooling and infrastructure.
Garry Tan
host
President and CEO of Y Combinator and host of The Lightcone.
Jared Friedman
host
Y Combinator partner and The Lightcone host with a strong technical/software engineering focus.
Harj Taggar
host
Y Combinator partner and The Lightcone host, known for founder-interview and product/strategy framing.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Y Combinator, featuring Jeffrey Morgan and Garry Tan, Open Models Change The Economics of AI explores open AI models drive cheaper tokens, faster tools, enterprise adoption Ollama is seeing a pronounced enterprise shift toward open models, driven first by coding agents and then by long-running “co-worker” agents that dramatically increase per-user token consumption.

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