Comment by andriy_koval
3 hours ago
> It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc.
my bet is that Chinese government fund Chinese models way more compared to what those companies receive (except llama, which is outdated but was strong foundation at its time)
The story of Reflection AI is supposedly that the company was faffing and failing at winning in the coding agent space, but was introduced to Jenson, who suggested they build an open-weight model and said he would fund it. That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot.
I think the bet would have to be that a US Open Weight company either: 1. Gets a lot of money from Jenson who views them as a counterbalance to the big labs in his ecosystem and a way to generate leverage (the same way he is positioning neoclouds-- it also could be synergistic with neoclouds who could offer the model serving endpoints) 2. Can fast follow the same way Mistral does (which, honestly, seems like just distilling the Chinese model, which distills the US lab but is pretty innovative on a whole lot of architecture both in training and serving land.) 3. AND figure out some (maybe not super lucrative but lucrative enough) sort of business model, as well. There are lots of possible business models, so I will be curious how this whole space evolves.
Jensen Huang is just trying to commoditize the complements to his GPUs.
> That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot.
I suspect 2B is not enough to boostrap frontier model from the scratch (for both talent and hardware)
I have a similar bet. Looks like people don't like this idea. You got downvoted a lot.