Comment by calebkaiser

Money is a big part of it. The notable thing about Chinese open models is their size. Most open source models out of US labs have not tried to compete with the enormous flagship models you see from frontier labs now. Cohere, Arcee, Poolside, etc all put out open source models, and of course, Google has their Gemma line, Meta has their open models, OpenAI released an open weight 120b model, etc. The incentives are just tricky for running a massive training run for a fully open model. Monetizing can be hard, as if you want to monetize inference, you'll be competing against platforms like Fireworks etc that will also be serving your model.

Thinking Machines just released an enormous open model though, and I'm hopeful to see more of this globally. I believe open models are emphatically a good thing. But I do sympathize with smaller labs trying to figure out the economics.