Comment by mirekrusin
4 days ago
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.
> ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.
we talked about Chinese models. Yes, erase/cap profits, PR, and give clients peace in mind that model access won't disappear. So, it is infiltraiting markets.
Your argument was that releasing models as open weight was allowing them to collect data but reality is that open weight models precisely allow users to completely avoid data collection – something that is not actually possible with closed weight models.
Motivations are more complex than that, if they wanted to achieve that they'd follow approach taken by some western labs to release weaker models only as open keeping frontier behind APIs.
I explained it already: open models -> market infiltration -> more data because many/majority clients still use official API because of convenience.
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