alt Hacker NewsThe state of open source AI
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Exactly 4 months ago, the marketshare on openrouter was 60%-40% in favor of closed models. Now it's 63%-37% in favor of open models. On March 19th, the open models processed 888B tokens in aggregate, yesterday, they processed 4.19T tokens in aggregate. That's almost 5x in 4 months! I can't think of the right intensifier to describe this level of growth.
If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter data), I built a dashboard that updates daily: https://dirac.run/labs-market-share
This presentation is painful to read. It's an LLM's idea of a CTO presentation. I'm overwhelmed by charts, only slightly connected to the text around them. But no matter, it looks like a CTO slide deck. HIGH IMPACT.
Much better would be if the CTO of Mozilla had actually articulated their own analysis.
As someone that's generally for the proliferation of open models, I want to take this seriously, but it's really difficult when it was clearly written by AI.
I guess they fired whoever used to write copy for these things.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to just dunk on them, I think it's actively hurting their own point to do this, and counter-productive when people can easily clock it - it makes some percent of the audience immediately tune out.
> Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community rose up to make sure it never could.
I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this article
It sure is nice to see that Mozilla is still doing all that they can to keep on top of current trends, except developing a decent privacy-focused web browser for developers and power users.
https://stateofopensource.ai/state-of-open-source-ai-2026.pd...
the pdf is easier to read
When europes mismanagement of AI suddenly turns out to be the best thing that has ever happened. At best only few billions lost to training models that become obsolete next month.
> The cloud era already ran this experiment: proprietary APIs plus data gravity made exit punitive. The repatriation wave is the receipt.
Some sentences smell a lot like AI.
The design and layout made it harder to read than it needed to be.
Regardless, the inference costs dropping almost 50× is really amazing to see. And now Kimi K3 release has shown how open models are getting closer to the frontier level already. Open source AI is moving a lot faster than Anthropic and OpenAI would have expected lol.
It’s literally a paradox. It cannot be changed. Open Source AI will ultimately win. Think it through.
Almost all about open weight, but the title says Open Source.
I see a gap in the ecosystem: too few mature open source harnesses.
I’d like a community led, BYOK, modular project where I can define, orchestrate, monitor and maintain agents.
Of course this is a new area and projects like this take time. But still, IMHO, a gap exists.
Unless someone wants to recommend their favorite FOSS tool; please do.
I’m not ready to celebrate the victory of open models just yet considering all the good ones are built by private, VC funded companies. How long will they continue to be charitable? And what’s their actual business model once the money stops and investors start demanding returns?
Gemini had a pop-up on my phone today, asking me if I wanted to "bring Gemini up to speed" by importing conversations from my other AI apps. This tells me that Google is threatened, or data hungry as always, or both. Open source AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, knocking on doors.
I don't love the appeal to romanticism portrayed in this article.
It appears open models were used to create this slop.
That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp.
Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like:
Open ships easy.
Open deploys hard.
Quick fix for the font, which many people are (rightly) complaining about.
Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName("quote")).forEach(p => { p.style.marginTop = "20px"; p.classList.remove("quote", "reveal") })
Maybe its the wildfire smoke in my eyes, but that font choice feels aggressive.
This new trend of content appearing while scrolling down is so terrible accessibility-wise, I do not understand how Mozilla of all institutions would do it.
Not every trend needs to be followed. Have some backbone. You receive donations to have that.
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Apart from the website being - frankly - bullshit, the content is also - frankly - bullshit.
It's just on the frontpage because the title says "open source AI".
mozilla only began babbling about open source ai when they got their teeth extracted for free via the entire community giving them the curbiest of curbstomps.
i still use firefox but hot damn did they utterly fail to read the room initially. the only other company i can think of in recent memory -- besides sony cutting out discs -- is logitech when their ceo began gibbering about a subscription mouse or microsoft and its copilot button(s).
Seems quite odd to use OpenRouter as “proof” that open weights models won. If you’re using OpenRouter, you’re already looking to bypass frontier models. To suggest there’s no longer a tradeoff simply isn’t true. But this isn’t the first time I thought Mozilla was a less than trustworthy source of information.
Mozilla presents themselves as an "open community". But they are a commercial corporation bankrolled by Google, and with an oppressive organizational culture. I would interpret this post as being not just about an opportunity for their self-aggrandizement, but also Mozilla trying to whitewash its mass surveillance of users, likely used also to train some model or another, or perhaps just to feed their patronn (Alphabet)'s ad machine.
They tell us about how the farmers and native people and whateve are all happy with their chatbots and models. The major effects are a massive and ever-increasing energy use - in a time where we must cut back and economize to avoid further global warming; a massive diversion of investment capital - especially in the US; fantastic stock valuations for a few tech giants (gee, I wonder whether any of them is related to Mozilla somehow); and other effects one could survey, all more significant by far than the examples they bring.
The UI is really hard on the eyes. Personally, I think the font size is way too big, and the animation timing feels off. If this is a benchmark page and not a product page, I feel like the information should be scannable at a glance. The UX is bad.
There isn't any open-source AI. There is Open AI (not to be confused with the closed company called OpenAI, which was unable to trademark its name). There's no open source AI both because the open source community doesn't have the resources to train a useful AI and because AI doesn't have source code.
Just like how the web was won?
I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.
We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.
If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.
Title: The state of open source AI.
First sentence: In New Zealand's far north, a Māori broadcaster...
...oh boy, that's all you need to read to know what kind of media diet the writer is on.
Haven't been following the articles and snippets we get from these labs about training their models for a while. But I'm guessing the latest chinese models are way less based on distilling? If not, then your speed of progress is still limited by the two labs (which we are collectively, in various forms subsidizing).
This is really insane to me.
There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models.
All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists?
Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things.
Open-source is and has been amazing but its so hard to deploy reliably and at scale and there's still big problems in the underlying models with instruction following and tool calling that makes it basically unusable for production workloads at a decent price point...
Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device.
The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have sweatily argued on this forum. Personally, I'm not convinced there's much of a difference between these models at this point. The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful.