Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

slowin

I'd love to! For real coding though, SOTA models barely get the job done. It wasn't until Opus 4.5 that you could really get decent results. I'm sure this will change (and I can't wait for it!) but as of today, open models might be fine for summarizing and writing docs, but you need SOTA to work on code if you want to be competitive.

gflh73

How is the NYT's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI going and why have you abandoned your start witness Suchir Balaji? Have you been brought into line? Open source AI also violates copyrights.

petcat

> Some U.S. firms remain reluctant to use Chinese A.I. models because of concerns over regulation and data privacy. AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta. This makes sense since corporations require legal certainty, and using an open model from an American company (probably) provides them some level of indemnity, and also someone to sue.

optimalsolver

Google can make themselves the heroes of the AI story by releasing a 120B dense Gemma model.

_doctor_love

Easy prediction: LLMs will get shrunk down further and further until GenAI is just something that ships on a chip as part of your hardware. In the future it will seem quaint that we needed a network connection to talk to our LLM. Adoption of open-source models to my mind is a similar step in that direction. In all cases, the goal is to become untethered from a mercurial vendor.

syntaxing

I swear, Qwen 3.8 27B @ Q8 is smarter than Sonnet 5 most of the time. Why wouldn’t corporate America self host at this point, especially with better options like Deepseek Flash and GLM 5.3 flash that’s a middle ground between Sonnet and Opus

cmiles8

Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any hope at a successful IPO. However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. It’s a pure commodity. Those selling compute and access to open models are gearing up to wipe the floor with Open AI and Anthropic.

chasd00

I'm not seeing it. Corporate America needs someone they can sue if anything goes sideways with AI given the rate of change and legal ambiguities. It took years/decades for actual, real, open source to be widely adopted in corporations for the same reasons.

MrResearcher

What IDE/extensions do you use for open-source LLMs? I tried VSCode with ollama and lm studio, and the experience is very subpar to the built-in copilot. It's not very usable.

cisrockandroll

Just use OpenRouter

arbuge

I think what they're really getting hooked on is the lowest cost provider. Which makes the Muse 1.3 launch this week particularly interesting, although to get the low cost version you do need to agree to share data with Meta.

motbus3

I had a conversation with a large group of friends and we independently came to the conclusion that Openai/Claude does not deliver more than a open source model. It takes about the same and the quality is about the same, and this does not mean it is good

schopra909

IMO this will be a blip. There’s a lot of talk in the wake of all the Uber handwringing about token spend. Legacy enterprises want to look innovative to Wall Street without spooking them, so it’s easy to hop on the narrative and “show” that they’re innovating in a cost responsible manner. This feels reminiscent of the big push to RAG a few years ago. And, more broadly the skunkworks projects that big companies tout in the press before they end up killing, when the operational overhead becomes too much for their liking. Ultimately, the narrative is good for the consumer and the enterprise. It’ll mean OpenAI and anthropic will have to keep prices low. But ultimately, in the course of the next 10 years, I don’t see enterprises wanting to do this themselves. It’ll just be simpler (and eventually safer in their eyes) to send traffic to the big labs.

iainctduncan

The thing is, for big companies (or even small ones owned by PE, which is MOST of them), it's not just about cost. The big thing is risk . In my experience as a tech diligence assessor for PE firms for the last 7 years, investors really, really don't like companies being beholded to single entities that they don't control. Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy, or predicatable, or finanically safe, or even capable of hitting three fucking nines. Investors know they need companies to be on the AI train, but they really don't like vendor lockin to the big AI companies. Every diligence I get asked "how easily can they change models?" I think when open models reach 80% or 90% capability (or maybe even less!) a whole lot of companies are going to say "almost as good with way less risk is a better deal".

swader999

At our small company we are hooked on individual subs. But yeah a larger dev shop can't really pull that off and I get how they'd be dying by the token cost.

falaki

They couldn't pick a more sinister headline for such an awesome technological development.

dominotw

how much of performance comes from inference time tricks like scaling, topn ect . maybe models providers are also in position to run their models vs running os models by a generic providerc

hintymad

I think using open-source AI is no longer about API cost but about company survival. Take Anthropic for an example. Anthropic has successfully destroyed customer trust, at least for me. DHH in a recent interview mentioned that Claude refused to translate an article about immigration. Not summarize. Not editorialize. Translate! I think this reveals an unacceptable level of paternalism: Anthropic fundamentally believes that it possesses a moral authority superior to the people actually paying for the API. If such basic and mechanical translation is already too sensitive to touch, the goalposts have moved from safety into outright censorship. What prevents them from quietly deciding tomorrow that your proprietary business logic, financial data, or legal documents cross their invisible moral line? Let alone how Anthropic treats Cursor and Figma - not that they are wrong as companies are free to compete legally, but nonetheless it shows that companies can't outsource their intelligence to a potential competitor.

biophysboy

I have recently come to the conclusion that thinking for 2 seconds and using a cheap model with a slightly more detailed prompt works just as well as zero-shotting an idea with a fancy model. I work in science, and instead of asking the model “write a topic extraction algorithm”, I just say “hey look at this matrix factorization script I found in a repo, now make it use plotly and duckdb”. Have others come to the same conclusion here? It makes me skeptical that the flagship companies are sustainable. Every company is going to maximize “fuel efficiency” to save time and money. Then again, maybe the cheaper models have more markup for them, in which case they are probably happy w this arrangement. I’d be curious to know how the money making varies by model.

manyatoms

My long term guess: A&OAI will move away from being interference providers to just training models and then licencing the models for local use