alt Hacker NewsYeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever. That can't be said for API-based models where a provider can sunset models whenever they feel like (i.e. gpt5-mini will soon be gone, and replaced by a more expensive 5.4-mini, same for goog, etc).
And there will always be incentivised parties that release models. Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going, as they're directly profiting from people running this. And the models aren't really far from open SotA anyway.
Goog will probably continue to release the small models, since they'll use them for browser stuff anyway, and know that they'll leak. So for them it's a win-win to release the small models and gain some dev market share.
And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models, and will likely continue to get gov support to do so (yay commercial wars between nations).
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Is this a valid point when we live in an evolving world. Language changes, facts change etc. Or can everything can just be grabbed from webpages and stored in the context window?
> Nvda for one has every incentive to keep the nemotron line going
They're releases so far have been kind of lackluster compared to Qwen and other Chinese models. My suspicion is that Nvidia won't be releasing models that appear to compete with frontier models because that would upset their big customers.
> Yeah, but the biggest plus for open models is that they can never be taken away. In other words, whatever capabilities they reach (even if there will never be another model), those stay forever.
In theory yes, but the average person can't really run the big open models.
This is already happening, try to find a provider that still hosts older, especially less popular or succeeded open models.
For me personally, I've been trying to access Kimi K2-0711. There seems to be only one provider left on openrouter (NovitaAI) and 3/4 requests error out
True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time.
A model that writes code without knowledge of any language or library changes for half a decade is less useful. A 2021 era chatgpt would be quite quaint in 2026.
Right now the Chinese labs might have incentives to release their models for free, and maybe Google is happy to release open weights today, but I'm sure there are already bean counters at Google salivating at the idea of having Gemini in Chrome as part of a Google AI monthly subscription just like YouTube premium and other Google subscriptions.
> And the chinese labs also have incentives to keep releasing models
Not really.
> they can never be taken away
Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California).
What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted.
Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.