[oytis]

What is the business model of open weight AI? I don't think there is any. At best it can serve as an advertisement for the more advanced models you sell.

The huge difference to open source is that you can't just train an LLM with free time and motivation. You need lots of data and a lot of compute.

I sure want to be wrong on that, I definitely like the open-weight version of the future more

[wood_spirit]

Meta released Llama just when OpenAI was so hot and its valuation was going through the roof. Speculating, but Meta probably thought the model not competitive enough to keep as a secret weapon but well good enough to commercially damage OpenAI who were a sudden competitor for most-valued-company?

In the same way you can imagine the Chinese government pushing the release of deepseek etc to make sure no one thinks the US has “won” and to keep everyone aware that a foreign model might leapfrog in the short term future etc.

At some point though if OpenAI/Antropic/Google plateau or go bust then the open source sponsorship becomes less likely, as making it open source was a weapon not a principle.

[2ndorderthought]

I disagree. I think deepseek, qwen, and kimi earn a lot of trust open sourcing their models. While still profiting.

Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to keep up with it to remain sustainable as a brand. Especially given how small their investments into this are.

Look at anthropics growing pains. Deepseek has other hosts spreading their brand for free while they grow. Brilliant honestly. In my opinion it makes anthropic and openai look clueless on a lot of levels.

China is playing a different game here. To them this is commoditizing their compliment and building good will. The Chinese economy doesn't teter on the brink of collapse to deliver frontier grade LLMs. Nope, Alibaba just made qwen because it needs it. It needs efficient models. Similarly, in China they manufacture and automate so much more than the US ever could. LLMs to them are a topping not the whole meal like they are in the us.

[mystraline]

Thats because the USA has really nothing big to export. Yay, designs.

China? Im getting ready to watch the URKL (universal robot knockout league) go on. The USA is dicking around with failed robot dogs.

The USA has been a failed country, coasting on massive inertia. But the tech avenues from a article I cant find showed the USA 8/64 areas excelling. China was 56/64 areas excelling.

[WarmWash]

China is an advanced 2nd world country with pockets of first world.

Smart people in China design fast manufacturing lines for $25k/yr.

Smart people in the US design bond hedging strategies or ad-pixel trackers for $250k/yr.

China is in the stage the US was in 60 years ago, and eventually those high paying, high impact jobs will suck the intelligence out of all the "blue collar" work. Just like it did in the US.

[2ndorderthought]

I believe it. The us intentionally lacks accountability to prop up the already wealthy in almost all of its ventures. Which socializes losses and capitalizes gains. It's an economic model that guarantees deterioration and stagnation.

Dodging politics, the power structures in us industry need serious revamping.

[mrleinad]

China is going to be the next Germany: a loser in the new world without globalization

[watwut]

> Thats because the USA has really nothing big to export. Yay, designs.

USA exports and exported services, especially in IT. And a lot. USA has nothing to export is true only if you intentionally ignore stuff USA exports.

[sillysaurusx]

If this is true, then why are most of the companies that change the world founded in the US?

[WarmWash]

The Chinese labs don't have to make money or be profitable. They are funded by the state to achieve the state's goals, and the global praise of their open models just serves as Chinese soft power.

They're state companies, not some kind of ethical VC charity fund project.

[2ndorderthought]

The fun part is, they are making money and have way less to pay off despite 100s of billions in donations than the US companies do.

[Spooky23]

Is it so different?

If the US’s fascist experiment continues past the current president, we’ll absolutely be nationalizing frontier companies or exerting equivalent control.

[treis]

Yes, China is very different from the US.

[try-working]

Correct. Open source is a PR and marketing strategy for new labs, regardless of origin.

https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...

[D2OQZG8l5BI1S06]

Interesting article, but Qwen does seem to be closing off. They don't release big variants anymore, and I'm not sure that the fact the local-LLM community keeps praising it actually increases the number of people using their API.

It did work for Deepseek for sure and it seems to move the needle for Xiaomi's MiMo; but will it be enough for Qwen and Gemma? Those are the models you can actually run without going all-in on AI (but only with gaming GPUs and such).

[try-working]

Definitely. Open releases will accelerate this year, including from Qwen because they're behind in adoption.

[HDBaseT]

You can still make money on open weight models.

The compute required to run these models is still very far out of reach for the average consumer, yet known enthusiast, therefore they still sell inference, whilst also getting consumer goodwill for providing open weights.

[datadrivenangel]

And the efficiency! Big accelerator cards are ~100x the throughput per watt in terms of raw processing power.

[js8]

What is the business model of Wikipedia? I don't think there is any.

Not everything good in our society needs to have a "business model". People still work on it. It's FINE.

[sroussey]

> What is the business model of Wikipedia?

Donations. Have you donated lately?

Wikipedia is cheap compared to creating and training models.

I don’t think donations will suffice at all.

As an example, we had millions of web developers download and install Firebug before browsers shipped their own dev tools. Donations over the course of multiple years would have paid my salary for a month if I were not a volunteer.

But from the “it’s fine” point of view, models will be baked into your OS.

Then later models will be embedded into hardware. Likely only OS makers models.

[selcuka]

> Wikipedia is cheap compared to creating and training models.

DeepSeek said it spent $5.6M [1] on training V3, which doesn't sound too much for a near-SOTA model.

An open source entity can come up with a hybrid business model, such as requiring a small fee from those who want to host the model as a business for the first n months following the release of a new model, but making it fully free for individuals.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

[avidphantasm]

Ultimately, information is a public good: it is non-excludable (you can’t stop people from using it) and it is non-rival (we can all use it at the same time). Public goods are often very useful, and because they are non-excludable and non-rival, ultimately can’t have a market-based business model. I would class open-weights AI models as public goods, and would support government expenditure to produce them.

[phainopepla2]

Training AI models is capital intensive, though. Unless there's some sort of mega-crowdfunding effort for open weight model training there needs to be a way to recoup that money on the other end. Either that or state sponsorship I guess

[try-working]

Open sourcing models is a marketing strategy. Chinese labs and small international labs have no awareness or distribution, so unless they become a hot topic for a while, nobody is going to bother trying out their models. Open source gets them that, and is essentially a tax on newcomers. When you start out you simply have no other option but to open source your models.

So, the business model of open models is the same as closed models: Sell inference. Open source is marketing for that inference.

https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...

[pabs3]

None of these models are open source, they are just public weights, with licensing that sometimes but usually doesn't meet the Open Source Definition.

The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is quite ridiculous, I prefer the Debian ML policy for defining freedoms around AI.

https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/

[kranke155]

China’s long term goal might just be to own the chip layer alongside everything else, and outproduce the US in data centers.

Frontier US labs could still have an advantage for a long time, but many use cases would start gravitating towards Chinese models if they 10x the data centers and provide similar quality inference for a third of the cost.

[PAndreew]

Perhaps you can create a compelling UX around it and sell it as a subscription. "Normies" will not be able/willing to build it. You can then patch the model/ship new features around it as it evolves. For example I have built an ambient todo list / health data extractor using Gemma 4 2EB and Whisper. Nothing to brag about but it does fairly decent job even in foreign languages.

[karussell]

> What is the business model of open weight AI?

This is what I do not understand as well and advertising the knowledge and more advanced model is also the only thing that comes to my mind.

Since a month I am using gemma4 locally successfully on a MBP M2 for many search queries (wikipedia style questions) and it is really good, fast enough (30-40t/s) and feels nice as it keeps these queries private. But I don't understand why Google does this and so I think "we" need to find a better solution where the entire pipeline is open and the compute somehow crowdfunded. Because there will be a time when these local models will get more closed like Android is closing down. One restriction they might enforce in the future could be that they cripple the models down for "sensitive" topics like cybersecurity or health topics. Or the government could even feel the need to force them to do so.

[2ndorderthought]

Why would you want to try to support all users simple queries on your ai data center if they could run it on their own computer?

It builds good will also. it also shows research prowess.

For China it's different. They need to show Americans who don't trust them at all because of propaganda that they have no tricks up their sleeve. It also doesn't hurt when Chinese companies drop models for free people can run at home that are about as good as sonnet. Serious mic drop.

[TheJCDenton]

Very good point on using local ai to avoid data centers costs.

Running AI models on local hardware was exploratory at first, and if it's so easy today it's thanks to open source. It's a little bit coincidental that we have this today, and that mainstream hardware have this capability. The fact that a phone can run very small models is exploratory or some kind of marketing opportunity at best.

Why would hardware company ships cards with more AI capabilites (like more VRAM) in the foreseable future ? On what ground does the marketing for on device AI will keep generating interest ? For something as important, it's very uncertain. But above all, it should not depends on these brittle justifications.

Showing good will in distribution and research prowess today is positive communication, but it can be exactly the oppositite if/when an attack using those small models will reach a high value target.

For China the cultural difference is so huge, it's difficult to say. I would think they first and foremost need to show to evryone inside and outside of China that they match american models. Second, i would say that when americans prefer few very powerfull companies on the get go because they can leverage a lot of capital rapidly to industrialize, China will prefer leveraging a lot of smaller companies exploring a lot of things simultanously (so doing a lot of research), THEN creating legislation to let only the best (or a few) to survive effectively. In the end it's the same result (monopoly or oligopoly), but China may have a stronger core (research) and America may have stronger productive capital, that may be proved obsolete... In the long run, in either side it's a gamble, again.

[2ndorderthought]

They have already shown that their models match or excel over American ones in different cases. For cheaper too.

I disagree on the second point. I think most Americans don't prefer fewer competition, that's a bit antithetical to the free market.

I doubt the Chinese government cares as much about controlling a few companies as you think they do.

China has a few things going for it beyond research. They are mission driven, they actually have needs for this technology, their needs will forward their entire economy as they are the world's largest manufacturers. They are also huge exporters and have buckets of customer support for various languages.

China also has considerably stronger infrastructure for electricity, etc. even with an nividia embargo they are doing more than showing up.

I don't think it's a matter of who "wins". There is no winning. I think China stands to gain far more from LLMs than the US does, and they have proven they don't need the us to do it, even with he us trying to sabotage it's every move into the space. The game is already more or less over in my mind.

If anything I see LLMs as having a huge market in China, and now the US can't even sell it to them.

All I care about is, if I have to use this technology, let me run it locally to avoid the surveillance capitalism aspect. That seems to be the real reason the us has propped up it economy in anticipation for this technology. Yet it doesn't long term benefit the us nor me.

[codebje]

I'd expect unified memory architectures (Apple M-series, AMD Ryzen AI series, etc) to be the future of local inference, not GPU cards.

[2ndorderthought]

Time will tell. Depends on small model architecture trends and hardware availability. I wouldn't be surprised if something came slightly out of left field. Considering Taiwan is trapped into producing the same chips for the next 2 years, I wouldn't be surprised if a new player emerged.

[karussell]

Indeed cost can be another factor. Maybe also the main reason why Chrome added an offline model.

[2ndorderthought]

That and it's lucrative for Android/chrome to have a text summarizer model embedded on your phone probably for government contracts and data exfil but we won't go through there.

[majormajor]

> What is the business model of open weight AI? I don't think there is any. At best it can serve as an advertisement for the more advanced models you sell.

I don't think local will necessarily be open-weight. And then it's not that different from personal computing: you're giving up the big lucrative corporate mainframe, thin-client model for "sell copies to a ton of individuals."

So it'd be someone else (an Apple, or the next-year equivalent of 1976 Apple) who'd start eating into that. There are a few on-device things today, but not for much heavy lifting. At first it's a toy, could maybe become more realized in a still-toy-like basis like a fully-local Alexa; in the future it grows until it eats 80-90% of the OpenAI/Anthropic use cases.

Incumbents would always rather you pay a subscription or per-use forever, but if the market looks big enough, someone will try to disrupt it.

[treis]

Compute has gone back and forth from mainframe/thin client to fat client a few times already. LLMs will probably follow at some point but I think it's going to take a long time.

The cost to transmit text is basically free and instantaneous. The rent (i.e. a GPU in a data center) vs buy is going to favor rent until buy is a trivial expense. Like 50-100 range.

Even then a LLM that just works is easier than dealing with your own

[majormajor]

Storage has moved back and forth but I don't thnk compute has ever really gone back to thin client. Even Gmail, Google Docs, etc are running a buttload of javascript on the user device. Various attempts at avoiding that (remote .NET or JVM stuff on early "smart-ish" phones) crashed and burned.

Video game streaming is the closest thing, and it's never really taken off. (And this, IMO, is a good comparison because it's a pretty similar magnitude up-front-cost, $500-$4000.)

Once the local-AI-is-good-enough (Sonnet level for a lot of basic tasks, say) for a $1k up-front investment the appeal of having something that can chew on various tasks 24/7 w/o rate limits, API token budget charge concerns, etc, is going to unlock a lot of new approaches to problems. Essentially more fully-baked line-of-business OpenClaw-type things. Or the smart home automation bot of Siri's dreams. You can more easily make that all private and secure when all the compute is local: don't give any outside network access. Push data into the sandbox periodically via boring old scripts-on-cronjobs, vs giving any sort of "agentic" harness external access. Have extremely limited data structures for getting output/instructions back out. I'd never want to pass info about my personal finances into a third party remote model; but I'd let a local one crunch numbers on it.

Even if you need Opus/Mythos/whatever level for certain tasks, if 95% of everything else you'd pay Anthropic or OpenAI for can now be done on things you own w/o third party risk... what does that do to the investment appeal of building better AI appliances to sell end users vs building better centralized models?

I think "what if today's LLM performance, but running entirely under your control and your own hardware" opens up a LOT of interesting functionality. Crowdsource the whole world's creativity to figure out what to do with it, vs waiting for product managers and engineers at 3 individual companies to release features.

[treis]

There was a time where people ran software on their computer with limited connectivity. Late 90s/early 2000s most of what you did was running locally on your machine. Your emails would be downloaded and there'd be a shared drive but otherwise all local.

Anyways, who's spending $1k for a LLM machine when they can spend $20 (or 0) on a subscription? And who's having an LLM crunching away 24/7 anyways? Anyone who is going to do something like that probably wants a cutting edge model.

It'll (probably) get to a point where the hardware is cheap enough and advancement levels off. But we're a ways from that and even then when a data center is 20ms away why not offload heavy compute that's mostly text in text out.

[zozbot234]

Except that buy is a trivial expense because the hardware has been bought already. You've got a whole lot of iGPU and dGPU silicon that's currently sitting idle as part of consumer devices and could be working on local AI inference under the end user's control.

[worldsayshi]

It should be feasible to crowd fund training runs right?

[dmd]

A training run costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. That’s a thousand millions.

How many crowdfunded projects do you know that have raised even one percent of that? Who’s going to be in charge of collecting that scale of money? Perhaps some sort of company formed for the benefit of humanity, which will promise to be a non-profit? Some sort of “Open” AI?

Oh, wait.

[derektank]

It’s well within the capabilities of governments in developed countries. If Mistral did not already exist, I would definitely expect the French government to invest in a national LLM, if only because of how defensive they are of the French language.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

<< That’s a thousand millions.

I can't say that you are lying and you are not exactly exaggerating either. It is true that a new SOTA model -- from literal scratch -- it would be expensive.

But, and it is not a small but, is the starting point really zero?

[jononor]

Hardware sales would be an excellent business model for open weights. Nvidia is already on it with their Nemotron models. Any new LLM/NPU hardware companies would want to so the same, if noone else does it for them (Chinese labs currently do).

Selling managed self-hosting solutions would be another. That is the business of that recent American company.

Selling fine-tuning services or similar adaptations is another. That is what Unsloth is going for, I believe.

Most likely any sound business strategy is going to be of "commoditize your compliments" type. There are many complementary products to open-weight - some probably not invented/discovered yet.

[fragmede]

The business model is the total lack of attention to Qwen and Kimi that would happen if their models weren't downloadable. Before releasing the weights, there was basically zero attention paid in the western hemisphere to them, for whatever reason. By releasing the weights, they're relevant in the western world. The business model is to get people in the West to pay to use their platform hosting their AI, that otherwise would never have heard of them. As you said, advertising/marketing, essentially.

[codebje]

Baidu have a lot of services I've never heard of, that are highly successful in China. The lack of interest in expanding into Western audiences doesn't seem to matter there - what's different about inference?

[fragmede]

Looking at Temu and Shien, there's a ton of interest in expanding into western audiences, the difference with inference is that they've found a way to make that happen. Vs, I don't have any use for, eg Baidu's equivalent to Google maps because I have, well, Google maps.

[sumeno]

If a local model hits critical mass the business model is to use it to shape opinions in a way that is advantageous for the company/owners.

Much like the current Twitter model, being able to put your thumb on the scale of "truth". Bake a stronger bias towards their preferred narrative directly into the model. Could be as "benign" as training it to prefer Azure over AWS. Could be much worse.

[dleslie]

This is where government funding can play a role.

Sometimes there are things where the public good is best served with public expenditure.

[CamperBob2]

"Government funding" these days would mean that Trump pays Elon Musk (or more likely vice versa) to make Grok 4.20 the only legal LLM for use by Americans.

[dleslie]

Outside of the USA it would not look like a wealth transfer to an oligarch.

Not every country is in a crypto-libertarian race to hoard power and wealth.

[CamperBob2]

Not every country is in a crypto-libertarian race to hoard power and wealth.

Meanwhile, in the EU, the model would be collectively financed, trained by a competent, neutral agency... and then completely lobotomized in the name of "the children," "safety," "IP rights," "correct speech," dozens of individual countries' legal and regulatory requirements, and any number of additional vocal, noncontributing NGOs.

So no one would get rich off of the public model, but no one would get much of anything else out of it, either.

As another reply suggests, there's a reason why things happen in the USA first. Even when they don't, the prime movers move here as soon as they can. Or at least they used to.

[dleslie]

European models are competitive, despite the concerns you raise.

I don't need a model that can easily produce CSAM or reproduce copyrighted works verbatim in order to be productive.

[CamperBob2]

EU models are not, in fact, competitive with US or Chinese models.

And that's not how these things work. If you censor the model for one purpose, you will degrade it for others. We both know that the bureaucrats won't stop at either of those purposes. It's not in a censor's nature to walk away satisfied.

[thefounder]

Cloud providers have incentives to release open source models but for some reasons this happens only in China. Amazon, Azure, Google benefit from open source models because people run them on their hardware.