[James333i]

I have shipped open weight models in iOS apps and agree with this in theory. A model is just one (significant) piece of the stack though. Prompting, adjustable parameters, tooling, workflows, and interfaces are what make a product usable. Black boxes, open and commercial, sit in most of the products people trust today.

As for the backdoor section, inspecting weights is not the same as auditing training. You can examine behavior and strip guardrails with fine tuning but you cannot determine from the weights what the model was trained on or whether the data was spiked. That can be a real problem for some use cases.

Closed models are far more opaque but you are buying in to a contract and accountability in exchange for the lack of transparency.