Demand for open-weight models is soaring

Illustration of three glass jars displayed on a store shelf, each containing a pink human brain suspended in bright blue liquid. The jars are overlaid with yellow circuit-board patterns and marked with colorful price stickers reading $5, $10, and $20
Illustration: Jared Bartman

Spare a thought for America’s leading developers of artificial intelligence. They pour blood, sweat and gazillions of dollars into each new release of a frontier model. Yet before they have time to catch their breath, their competitors have already caught up. It would be bad enough if rivals that charge for their technology were the only ones nipping at their heels. But the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI must also sprint to stay just a few steps ahead of labs that give their models away.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Weights of the world”

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.Shell casings on carts in the large-caliber ammunition production line at the ZVS Holding AS plant in Dubnica nad Vahom, Slovakia