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.
I also work in software, and while I vaguely disagree that open models can't be used (they absolutely fit into productive niches here, and holy hell are the last generation [ex laguna s1, kimi k3, glm 5.3, etc] actually decent) - I will agree that SOTA are a better fit for software development, especially when used in conjunction with an already very expensive employee who's driving them.
But for "Corporate America"... no. You absolutely don't need SOTA. They're doing things like transcription, summarization, customer interaction, minor technical tasks like form creation in existing tools, report generation (ex - powerpoint, pdf, docs, etc) and other general "white collar tasks". Think about roles in business that are in the 60-85k compensation range.
It's mostly busy work that keeps existing processes flowing and the business on the rails. Important, but not research/novel.
And cheap ai... is a wonderful fit for a lot of this. No one wants to replace an employee making 80k with a less reliable AI that costs 45k a year in tokens (SOTA). But they're absolutely willing to drop 2-3k/year on AI (~100/month - right in the open model cost range) for that employee if they can get a 10% bump in productivity or happiness.
Have you been brought into line? Open source AI also violates copyrights.
This is actual communism, and the fact that Bernie Sanders and every other member of the DSA isn't actively fighting for open source and is often fighting against all AI shows how fake their purported movements are and have always been.
https://jacobin.com/2026/07/ai-nationalization-sanders-liber...
Open source authors have always been protective of their copyright. There are numerous examples when drivers have been copied between BSD/Linux (I forget which direction) which led to huge flame wars.
The whole point of the GPL is that it uses copyright and copyright assignment to the FSF to protect what it calls software freedom.
BSD authors are very upset if the attribution clause isn't observed. And so on.
It is communism to exploit poor open source authors? I have to read Marx again.
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.
Counterparty risk is a lot more straight-forward to evaluate when dealing entirely within the US, with US companies.
The thing is that needs more attention is reverse engineered a LLM which is highly fascinating. I tried it, but it seems I am not there yet to put it mildly. It requires serious effort.
I am just speculating but can LLMs be sleepers? You write software and it seeds traces here and there under certain conditions that pose a serious security risk.
Or a kill switch?
I don’t know. I distrust Chinese LLMs but even more due to training data.
It is after all not a Western model. Different biases and the might be subtle but nevertheless substantial.
In short: no open source LLM may be usable without additional Finetuning for certain valid use cases.
The real value is versioning and autonomy as well as lot more stable answering despite model rot.
Also testing and the supporting systems are easier to maintain.
It is mainly an infrastructure challenge.
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.
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.
To the extent that that's true (it isn't), said fans are idiots. Open source licenses are only enforceable because of copyright law. How are you going to enforce GPL3 when you have no legal authority to say what people are allowed to do with your code?
The fact they prioritize other fights more than OSS, and have a rather dim view of AI, is hardly proof that they are fake.
aaraujo002•1h ago