Open sourcing models is a marketing strategy. Chinese labs and small international labs have no awareness or distribution, so unless they become a hot topic for a while, nobody is going to bother trying out their models. Open source gets them that, and is essentially a tax on newcomers. When you start out you simply have no other option but to open source your models.

So, the business model of open models is the same as closed models: Sell inference. Open source is marketing for that inference.

https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...

Meta released Llama just when OpenAI was so hot and its valuation was going through the roof. Speculating, but Meta probably thought the model not competitive enough to keep as a secret weapon but well good enough to commercially damage OpenAI who were a sudden competitor for most-valued-company?

In the same way you can imagine the Chinese government pushing the release of deepseek etc to make sure no one thinks the US has “won” and to keep everyone aware that a foreign model might leapfrog in the short term future etc.

At some point though if OpenAI/Antropic/Google plateau or go bust then the open source sponsorship becomes less likely, as making it open source was a weapon not a principle.

What is the business model of Wikipedia? I don't think there is any.

Not everything good in our society needs to have a "business model". People still work on it. It's FINE.

Perhaps you can create a compelling UX around it and sell it as a subscription. "Normies" will not be able/willing to build it. You can then patch the model/ship new features around it as it evolves. For example I have built an ambient todo list / health data extractor using Gemma 4 2EB and Whisper. Nothing to brag about but it does fairly decent job even in foreign languages.

> What is the business model of open weight AI?

This is what I do not understand as well and advertising the knowledge and more advanced model is also the only thing that comes to my mind.

Since a month I am using gemma4 locally successfully on a MBP M2 for many search queries (wikipedia style questions) and it is really good, fast enough (30-40t/s) and feels nice as it keeps these queries private. But I don't understand why Google does this and so I think "we" need to find a better solution where the entire pipeline is open and the compute somehow crowdfunded. Because there will be a time when these local models will get more closed like Android is closing down. One restriction they might enforce in the future could be that they cripple the models down for "sensitive" topics like cybersecurity or health topics. Or the government could even feel the need to force them to do so.

> What is the business model of open weight AI? I don't think there is any. At best it can serve as an advertisement for the more advanced models you sell.

I don't think local will necessarily be open-weight. And then it's not that different from personal computing: you're giving up the big lucrative corporate mainframe, thin-client model for "sell copies to a ton of individuals."

So it'd be someone else (an Apple, or the next-year equivalent of 1976 Apple) who'd start eating into that. There are a few on-device things today, but not for much heavy lifting. At first it's a toy, could maybe become more realized in a still-toy-like basis like a fully-local Alexa; in the future it grows until it eats 80-90% of the OpenAI/Anthropic use cases.

Incumbents would always rather you pay a subscription or per-use forever, but if the market looks big enough, someone will try to disrupt it.

It should be feasible to crowd fund training runs right?

If a local model hits critical mass the business model is to use it to shape opinions in a way that is advantageous for the company/owners.

Much like the current Twitter model, being able to put your thumb on the scale of "truth". Bake a stronger bias towards their preferred narrative directly into the model. Could be as "benign" as training it to prefer Azure over AWS. Could be much worse.

This is where government funding can play a role.

Sometimes there are things where the public good is best served with public expenditure.

The business model is the total lack of attention to Qwen and Kimi that would happen if their models weren't downloadable. Before releasing the weights, there was basically zero attention paid in the western hemisphere to them, for whatever reason. By releasing the weights, they're relevant in the western world. The business model is to get people in the West to pay to use their platform hosting their AI, that otherwise would never have heard of them. As you said, advertising/marketing, essentially.