alt Hacker News> What is the business model of Wikipedia?
Donations. Have you donated lately?
Wikipedia is cheap compared to creating and training models.
I don’t think donations will suffice at all.
As an example, we had millions of web developers download and install Firebug before browsers shipped their own dev tools. Donations over the course of multiple years would have paid my salary for a month if I were not a volunteer.
But from the “it’s fine” point of view, models will be baked into your OS.
Then later models will be embedded into hardware. Likely only OS makers models.
> Wikipedia is cheap compared to creating and training models.
DeepSeek said it spent $5.6M [1] on training V3, which doesn't sound too much for a near-SOTA model.
An open source entity can come up with a hybrid business model, such as requiring a small fee from those who want to host the model as a business for the first n months following the release of a new model, but making it fully free for individuals.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437