Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…
The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues: 1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did. 2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable? edit: typo
For example, Google has a vested interest in making Gemma as good as it can, because ultimately any edge inference is free for Google and they have a massive install base.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple eventually trained their own foundational models, and while it'd be surprising, I wouldn't be shocked if Apple also released open weight edge models one day. Their Mac business is benefiting a lot from local AI, and for an extremely long list of reasons, Apple doesn't want either OpenAI or Anthropic to "win" and supersede their walled gardens as the first entry point.
There are a lot of incentives for open weight, Mistral is probably going to keep on making at least some open models, and meanwhile in the image generation space, we've got Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and BFL continues to ship most of their models as weights available (but under non-commercial licenses).
Oooh, and NVIDIA has been releasing open source ML, and now LLM models for what, a decade? NVIDIA likes selling hardware, Nemotron models, while rarely topping leaderboards (probably not benchmaxxed), are generally fine and really great models for fine-tuning or CPT.