alt Hacker NewsAs to the 2nd part of your message, it's really easy to verify yourself (on openrouter).
DSv4-flash is currently being served at 0.14/0.24 $/MTok by most of the providers (8 as of writing this) and even a bit cheaper by 2 providers.
Minimax2.7 is being served at 0.30/1.20 $/MTok by most providers (4 providers as of writing this) and double that price by 2 providers.
As for the first part of your message, this is actually a good illustration of the miss-understanding of licensing LLMs. There are open-source models out there (Apache 2.0 and MIT) and there are also source-available (i.e. open weights) in llamas, minimax2.7 and something in between with the latest kimi (MIT w/ attribution). Open source in the context of LLMs means that you get a license to run, inspect, modify and re-release a model. It was never about data or training. But that's a very common interpretation, that's wrong IMO. But I get that it's contested, so anyway. Sorry for the tangent.
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Third party inference costs are a moot point for people running these models locally.
I am currently serving Minimax M2.7 to myself at ~$0.015/1M blended tokens worth of electricity on my own local hardware, where I get all of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability benefits that are lost when choosing to run open weight models on someone else's API.
Open source means that all of the information necessary to recreate the final product is public, which in the context of LLMs, would include all of the training material, and build instructions (scripts to do the training). Very few models actually achieve this - Nemotron family is the only one that comes top of mind. A license to run, inspect, modify, and re-release is a good improvement on open weight models, but does not alone amount to the model actually being open source.
You are welcome to an alternative understanding of the definition of open source - as you correctly note, it's a contested term - just know that your definition is not the more widely accepted one that people think of when they hear "open source".
Your version of the term is much more aligned with the OSI, which was a federation of anti-FLOSS industry bodies created with the intent to capture, redefine, and weaken the original spirit of the FLOSS movement, which predates the OSI by almost a decade - the GPL was first released in '89, compared to the OSI's formation in '98 by members of the $10B for-profit Netscape Corporation, who's flasgship product was originally proprietary and was only open sourced after commercial failure against proprietary competitors.
None of this should be construed as an implication that I'm anti-open-weight. As I mentioned earlier, I think open weight models fulfill a lot of the spirit of open source. While a world where truly open source models are the norm is obviously preferable to a world where only open weight models are the norm, a world where only open weight models are the norm is still vastly preferable to a world where proprietary models running on other people's hardware is the norm.
I just think that we should be careful to avoid watering down terminology in ways that serve proprietary commercial interests over the interests of the public and of users. Open-washing is real, and it harms the intersts of users.
> Open source in the context of LLMs means that you get a license to run, inspect, modify and re-release a model. It was never about data or training.
eeeh? what?
the whole reason "open-weights" phrase got coined was because corps started sharing weights, but no way to replicate the training that created it
it was viewed the same as sharing compiled binary, but no source code - against the whole point of open-source