[yorwba]

The problem with giving away weights for free while also offering a hosted API is that once the weights are out there, anyone else can also offer it as a hosted API with similar operating costs, but only the releasing company had the initial capital outlay of training the model. So everyone else is more profitable! That's not a good business strategy.

New entrants may keep releasing weights as a marketing strategy to gain name recognition, but once they have established themselves (and investors start getting antsy about ROI) making subsequent releases closed is the logical next step.

[roenxi]

That is also how open source works in other contexts. Initially closed source is dominant, then over time other market entrants use OSS solutions to break down the incumbent advantage.

In this case I'm expecting people with huge pools of capital (the big cloud providers) to push out open models because the weights are a commodity then people will rent their servers to multiply them together.

[yorwba]

Even for a big cloud provider, putting out model weights and hoping that people host with them is unlikely to be as profitable as gating it behind an API that guarantees that people using the model are using their hosted version. How many people self-hosting Qwen models are doing so on Aliyun?