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It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
by supriyo-biswas 5mo ago
It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.
- davidkwast 5mo agoAs what we say here in Brazil: "The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"
- yoyohello13 5mo agoAmerican companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.
- treis 5mo agoLlama?
- ndiddy 5mo agoOne of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell. For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.
- mullingitover 5mo ago> None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0 Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?" I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.
- nradov 5mo agoMeta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".
- h8hawk 5mo agoThey are useless and outdated by today standards.
- sofixa 5mo agoWhen was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy.
- nradov 5mo agoIn business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- jdironman 5mo agoThank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoGoogle had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.
- philipkglass 5mo agoThey aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/ https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemotron,-The%20NVIDIA%20Nemotron https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasoning-vision-and-the-lessons-of-training-a-multimodal-reasoning-model/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin... https://www.ibm.com/granite https://www.ibm.com/granite https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoI was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.
- philipkglass 5mo agoI think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.
- 0xpgm 5mo agoPerhaps, the issue is that the pace at which they release open models compared to their closed ones, shows that they are more committed on the closed ones and are not interested in advancing the state of the art of open models.
- no-name-here 5mo agoShould companies like Google and OpenAI be more interested in building open models than the ones they make money from? Should they be interested in advancing state of the art open models?
- an0malous 5mo agoNo one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.
- 0xpgm 5mo agoI'm curious, what would you say is DeepSeek's core competency?
- floam 5mo agoDistillation attacks. The weights are just a proof-of-work hash
- LadyCailin 5mo agoDevaluing American companies, perhaps.
- an0malous 5mo agoSince it’s probably a state sponsored project, it is the open source ancillary tool to China’s core competencies
- fireant 5mo agoOpenAI & Anthropic are winning right now. I suspect if Chinese companies get ahead in the race the cards will reverse, OpenAI will restart farming goodwill with open models and then winning companies will be releasing closed models.