alt Hacker NewsPeople pay money for the solar panels, though. It's not obvious to me that giving away expensive LLMs for free is meaningfully helping grow the domestic economy, as opposed to foreign inference providers who get their GPUs from Nvidia.
People pay money for the solar panels, though. It's not obvious to me that giving away expensive LLMs for free is meaningfully helping grow the domestic economy, as opposed to foreign inference providers who get their GPUs from Nvidia.
Giving away open weight models, if you dismiss altruism as a motivation from the outset, is a way to salt the earth while at the same time building mindshare.
It makes it harder to extract decent margins from models at or below the quality of the open models, and so makes it harder both for new entrants and for any existing providers that are depending on cheaper models for revenue. At the same time you make people comfortable with your product.
It's the IP version of dumping products below cost if you're capital rich and want to winnow down the competitive field while "buying" customers.