Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.
[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.
Whether it's feasible to release everything under open terms is actually a different issue from whether they're being truthful in how they're advertising it.
Not speaking on behalf of my employer and I have no insight into this strategy at all, but I feel like the sale of consumer GPUs is so small by comparison to data centers (more than 10x from what I can tell online) that more users of open weights wouldn't likely make much difference in the earnings report.
This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.
Call it free, available, downloadable etc, but not "Open".
Either way, Mistral is a failing company with little relevance in the AI space and that's not going to save them.
Surely they'll outcompete everyone on cost alone