I’d still say sort-of. Llama, after the initial leak, was set up to take advantage of the benefits of open source, but the most competitive and best-known open-source models are from China, and at this point they’ve got the brand recognition to match. OpenAI releasing a heavily-nerfed open-source model well behind the frontier didn’t hold headlines for more than a day, for instance, whereas everyone knows about GLM-5.2.
Of course, an American frontier company might completely pivot and open-source something competitive in a huge public display, but I consider it unlikely. Anthropic and OpenAI seem very ideologically committed to closed-source, even as the doomsday predictions around open-sourcing have consistently failed to materialize. XAI might’ve done it if the tech libertarian ethos were in power on the Right, but while it is relatively popular among voters who care about this issue, the administration has generally skewed safetyist on model releases, or at least tried to appease their concerns. Google is fairly subdued in its communications, but I don’t see them breaking from any established traditions.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has given open source its official blessing.
Is this true given that U.S companies such as Thinking Machines and Meta release some open-weight models?
I’d still say sort-of. Llama, after the initial leak, was set up to take advantage of the benefits of open source, but the most competitive and best-known open-source models are from China, and at this point they’ve got the brand recognition to match. OpenAI releasing a heavily-nerfed open-source model well behind the frontier didn’t hold headlines for more than a day, for instance, whereas everyone knows about GLM-5.2.
Of course, an American frontier company might completely pivot and open-source something competitive in a huge public display, but I consider it unlikely. Anthropic and OpenAI seem very ideologically committed to closed-source, even as the doomsday predictions around open-sourcing have consistently failed to materialize. XAI might’ve done it if the tech libertarian ethos were in power on the Right, but while it is relatively popular among voters who care about this issue, the administration has generally skewed safetyist on model releases, or at least tried to appease their concerns. Google is fairly subdued in its communications, but I don’t see them breaking from any established traditions.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has given open source its official blessing.