Why does Microsoft keep releasing models trained on synthetic data? Is it possible their contract with OpenAI won't let them do anything else? I would think Microsoft, of all companies, would want to be working on their own LLM behind the scenes, even if they're relying on OpenAI for the bulk of their work. Meta seems to be the only US company releasing big 'open source' models, while Chinese companies continue to re…
This model in particular makes sense to be synthetic though. It’s explicitly trained to control a computer, and I doubt there’s a large enough amount of public training data on this use case.
I suspect that Chinese models are largely forced to open source as a trust building step because of general China-phobia in the west. There’s tons of stellar LLMs available from major US companies if you’re just using an API. It’s also a convenient marketing and differentiation opportunity. Some of the companies behind the bigger “agentic” models have started to offer a cheap subscription alternative to US companies. If they build up a big enough business I wouldn’t be surprised if they stop open sourcing right away.