Comment by andriy_koval
4 days ago
sure, they have advantage of being first movers and being domestic companies. Chinese models need extra step to infiltrate US and other markets.
4 days ago
sure, they have advantage of being first movers and being domestic companies. Chinese models need extra step to infiltrate US and other markets.
Move like making api substantially cheaper or free would make more sense.
Making it open weight does the opposite – it allows traffic to not be routed through them at all.
they needed to take multiple steps to catch up. Why else do you think they make open models?
Depends who you ask:
META releases open weight models because selling access to models isn't their business model, they get optimization for free, good press with adoption of their tech etc. They don't want AI to become another iOS, they want to commoditize the layer underneath them.
GOOGLE releases open weight models because they complement the rest – from premium offering to Android/Chrome/Google Cloud etc products. They use it as part of open ecosystem / local / edge / experimentation layer. 400 million downloads with 100k community variants is nice vibrant ecosystem they have and want to have, they can capture value in several places and would prefer if devs standardize on their tooling.
OPEN AI because their PR was shit and it saved them, purely defensive move, which is interesting considering their name and initial goal.
ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.
DEEPSEEK they want to have day-zero support for all possible hardware platforms, they started it because Liang wanted to do it, had resources from High-Flyer to do it and he said fuck it and did it (zero commercial incentives which is so bizzare that it deserves a movie or something). He wants to do it because his destination is AGI. In that sense he's more original OpenAI than OpenAI.
MISTRAL because they want to be to AI what RedHat is to Linux.
NVIDIA because they sell GPUs.
...the list is long, there are few dozens of companies including Microsoft, IBM, AI2, Databricks, Snowflake, xAI, EleutherAI, Hugging Face etc. that release open weight models, there are thousands of models and tens of thousands of fine tunes across across text, image, video, audio etc.
In general half life of any model is short. What is more lasting is ecosystem around it, releasing new generation as open doesn't give away technical advantage.
They give away asset for which strategic value is deprecating rapidly and in exchange they get developers, mindshare, tooling, optimizations, integrations, research, standarisation etc. and put pressure on competitors destroying their margins.
It's not an absurd way of thinking, it may seem like irrational move but let's wait and see – imho labs like Anthropic can't sustain long term this kind of pressure and will eventually collapse – regardless of the fact that currently they look like strongest player that can't be touched, the whole thing they have holds on thin, fragile support that gets eroded.
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