I strongly prefer a world where open models "win," that said...
I don't understand how we will sustain an ecosystem of open models like the one that exists today. My thoughts go down this path every time I try to put the pieces together:
- Many open models depend on high quality frontier models as a distillation input
- US closed frontier models drive China's open model strategy despite the business model for open models being somewhat fuzzy
- What is the business model that benefits from open weights, exactly? How do their vendors recoup infrastructure and training costs?
I would be grateful to be enlightened on this topic.
Wouldn’t be that different from open source software, which has been very successful in many circles.
You make money from value-add on top of the models not the models themselves.
Open source software does not require trillions of dollars in R&D to produce the next iteration
Yeah but open source is often a few guys working on their free time, or a large company open sourcing libraries that they wouldn't be able to sell anyway, or donations from corporations that are at best in the order of a million dollars.
For frontier models you have players investing billions.