Why? All three of those companies have an obvious and outspoken commitment to releasing models for free, they aren't trying to manipulate fear to sell a product like OpenAI.
Microsoft is invested in OpenAI. Have they released any open weight models themselves?
Apple is similarly partnering with OpenAI.
Google has released nerfed versions of its Gemini models (Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B).
It seems the only company truly setting an example for open weights is Meta. Hopefully the other companies realize that it’s in their best interest to do the same (as it seems Google is begrudgingly realizing with its nerfed releases).
Eventually open weights will win, and if OpenAI (the most ironically named company) continues to rely on closed models as its moat, it will lose.
Not only have all three of these companies released LLM model weights, Google and Microsoft especially have released nearly countless model architectures, weights, evaluation/training/inference/etc frameworks, toolkits, etc across an extremely wide spectrum.
They mainly offer open tooling to help you adopt their closed-source tech (e.g. RAG frameworks) but you don't get the freedom to do what you want with the model (which is the core).
At some point, these big companies may even want to put more regulation or restrictions on their open-weights / open-source competitors. "Hey this is not validated for safety, you can use only Gemini"
They don't? Microsoft and Google both promote Open Source inferencing frameworks, and while both also have proprietary products I think it's completely dishonest to say they "mainly" support them. ONNX and Tensorflow have been supported longer and more productively than any of the closed-source AI frameworks Google or Microsoft offer.
I’m feeling that the next step will be for regulators to start restricting more and more open-source/open-weight LLMs (and their equivalent Diffusion models), in the name of safety.
Perhaps requiring certifications in professional use for example.
I see it as a happy coincidence for these large players if this is the case, because only folks with large pockets and the right thoughts will be able to get certified.
Well then yes, I would definitely say Phi. And on top of that Microsoft has been releasing a ton of the tooling surrounding LLMs and AI as well, including Semantic Kernel.
Really makes me wonder what the angle here is for them. With open source, I can somewhat understand given market standards become easier to hire for and you get feedback on your tooling. It seems unlikely that either will be true for open-weight models. It also seems unlikely they would be able to establish market domination and then increase prices if everything remains open.
In all three cases, they own hardware (Apple in a slightly different sense) that they'd love for you to pay to run your favorite models on, open or closed.