If you have a ton of capital, you still can't spin up Claude Opus and compete on price with Anthropic with your new fancy optimizations. With open models you can and that is great for consumers.
That's my point. This "open source" doesn't feel like the real open source. It's open just for the few ones with ton of capital, and mostly in the US, or US adyacent markets. It's like if SpaceX publish an open source rocket design and people celebrating like it's the new Linux. Feels more like a goodwill gesture than something with real impact for the benefit of mankind, like the spirit of open source software as commonly understood.
The point is that you need several orders of magnitude less capital to run GLM-5.2 compared with the investment needed to train a model like Opus or GLM-5.2 from scratch. To do inference of GLM-5.2 you'd need an investment of roughly less than €300k (8x H200 at GLM5.2 FP8), which is completely feasible for a lot of hosting businesses.
Even if end-users can't run these models themselves at home, there are a lot more and varied options to choose from, especially considering privacy and data protection.
You can apparently also do GLM-5.2 at Q4_K_XL with 2x RTX 3090 and lots of RAM [1], but I don't think that counts as a potential frontier model.
That's my point. This "open source" doesn't feel like the real open source. It's open just for the few ones with ton of capital, and mostly in the US, or US adyacent markets. It's like if SpaceX publish an open source rocket design and people celebrating like it's the new Linux. Feels more like a goodwill gesture than something with real impact for the benefit of mankind, like the spirit of open source software as commonly understood.