open weights model is like... Winamp for example.
it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR.
They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market.
they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.
open source != open weights
open weights model is like... Winamp for example. it's free, you can download it and use it however you like, you could also do some binary patching or dll injections to alter it functionality but it's not enough to develop next version.
the same is with ai models, weights are the binary final artifacts. for development and improvements you need to have training data, pipelines, RL harnesses, etc.
also of you believe Chinese companies will be releasing weights indefinitely, you are not understanding motivations.
Chinese companies spend significant amounts of money to train a model so why they are releasing it for free? they basically provide researchers starting point for developing tooling and optimizations for serving the model in return. and also get some PR. They also do not have to pay for inference of those models that much, as they probably serve them with loss anyways to gain market. they are gov sponsored so money are not issue there, so they try to speedrun their way to what US companies have. And guess what happens when they reach it. they will stop releasing weights and increase pricing or will use them for gov purposes.