> This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta.
I see this as a fault with Meta's models, not a fault with the concept of open weights. The Llama family just aren't very useful. They make flowery prose but they're terrible at tool calling [1][2][3] so there just isn't much I can actually accomplish with them.
[1] https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html [2] https://benchlm.ai/best/tool-use [3] https://benchlm.ai/llm-agent-benchmarks
If the models were the quality of GPT-5.6, or Opus 4.8, would Meta really reap any benefits? Maybe in a zero-sum way, because OpenAI and Anthropic would lose. But I'm not sure they'd be that much more ahead either.