About this episode
The episode discusses the rise of open models in the AI ecosystem and their potential impact on the industry.
2025 was the year where a lot of companies started to take open models seriously as a path to influence in the extremely valuable AI ecosystem — the adoption of a strategy that was massively accelerated downstream of DeepSeek R1’s breakout success. Most of this is being done as a mission of hope, principle, or generosity. Very few businesses have a real monetary reason to build open models. Well-cited reasons, such as commoditizing one’s complements for Meta’s Llama, are hard to follow up on when the cost of participating well is billions of dollars. Still, AI is in such an early phase of technological development, mostly defined by large-scale industrialization and massive scale-out of infrastructure, that having any sort of influence at the cutting edge of AI is seen as a path to immense potential value. Open models are a very fast way to achieve this, you can obtain substantial usage and mindshare with no enterprise agreements or marketing campaigns — just releasing one good model. Many companies in AI have raised a ton of money built on less. The hype of open models is simultaneously amplified by the mix of cope, disruptive anticipation, and science fiction that hopes for the…
People in this episode
Host: Nathan Lambert
Topics covered
- open models
- AI ecosystem
- industrialization
- technology development
- business strategy
Keywords
- open models
- AI
- DeepSeek
- Llama
- technology
- business strategy
- industrialization
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: DeepSeek
Products: Llama
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