alt Hacker NewsThe current balance of power in open models
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Impressive you know. They are a few months behind but still the world uses their models. Bet you because the users suspect that Americans will pull the rug from under them. Few months behind versus being left behind forever. Would have been nice to know the differences in spending between the models but I suspect the data is impossible to collect.
Really important work here. Really glad it's being shared a) with US Leadership and b) with the community.
Thank you for sharing this perspective. I agree with the conclusions outlined. However, I would have appreciated more insights into the OpenAI OSS family of models like gpt-oss.
This is a prepared statement for congress by Nathan Lambert, author of https://rlhfbook.com/ and AllenAi employee (one of the few who have shared their models as open source)
DeepSeek and Qwen set a floor American open-weight models can't match without subsidy or a different cost structure, and that price/performance ratio drives adoption more than benchmarks.
As an aside, it’s always funny to me that anybody outside of Europe listens to anything the Europeans say about AI. The Europeans literally have zero skin in the game. Their entire raison d’être is just to pass regulations that they then attempt to extraterritorially enforce, but they contribute almost nothing to the area of interest. It’s legit insane to me.
The contributions they make vs the amount of inconvenience they are vis-a-vis compliance with their own esoteric rules probably fit some Pareto maximum of 20% of users requiring 80% of the work for compliance. The rest of us (ie, the non-European world) should honestly just point and laugh and then move on when these people try to influence things.
It's becoming more clear that for big enterprises to really adopt AI, they need to use open models. Especially if they want to own their own intelligence, which they should.
I spent the last 2 days building basic AI agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflows for a large company. Those seemingly boring workflows had bank statements, supplier IDs and other sensitive information.
For me it was all alarm bells, there is no way they can afford to give closed models access to this data. I was compelled to figure out an open model based solution for them, which made me realize that this is probably the only way for enterprises going forward.