alt Hacker NewsOpen weight LLMs aren't supposed to "beat" closed models, and they never will. That isn’t their purpose. Their value is as a structural check on the power of proprietary systems; they guarantee a competitive floor. They’re essential to the ecosystem, but they’re not chasing SOTA.
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> Their value is as a structural check on the power of proprietary systems
Unfortunately that doesn't pay the electricity bill
This may be the case, but DeepSeek 3.2 is "good enough" that it competes well with Sonnet 4 -- maybe 4.5 -- for about 80% of my use cases, at a fraction of the cost.
I feel we're only a year or two away from hitting a plateau with the frontier closed models having diminishing returns vs what's "open"
> Open weight LLMs aren't supposed to "beat" closed models, and they never will. That isn’t their purpose.
Do things ever work that way? What if Google did Open source Gemini. Would you say the same? You never know. There's never "supposed" and "purpose" like that.
I can attest to Mistral beating OpenAI in my use cases pretty definitively :)