Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models.
The most powerful models from U.S. labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are closed, meaning the parameters that shape their outputs are kept secret.
[Open weight] models are improving rapidly
Aka: not profitable. Show me the profit! I’m sick of the open/closed debate, this technology is not ready in any form. No ‘improving rapidly’, no ‘growing revenue’, fucking profit. We’re deep into an ai bubble without any profitable ai company, open or closed. We are years in without any proven productivity increases, no software improvements, no hardware improvements. Everything has gotten worse: software is more brittle than ever, SaaS offerings are less reliable and functional, and every new consumer product is a shitty new way to farm more data. Oh and the internet is ruined.
The solution to corpo-llms being shoved down our throats isn’t to run a bunch of open llms instead. This tech is not nearly as useful as anyone says it is, if at all.
Also, it’s weird to avoid talking about France and mistral in an article about open weight models.