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If open weight models are the future, U.S. AI companies are going to have a hard time
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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The awkward part is that software has a habit of racing toward free once it becomes good enough. If an open weight model delivers 95 percent of the value without recurring API costs, plenty of companies will choose that and spend the savings on integration instead. History keeps rhyming, even if investors hate the tune.
I don't know... I was using Open(now Libre)Office over 20 years ago, it wasn't just good enough, it was better than MS Office at the time, and yet... even though LibreOffice has been free and far more than "good enough" for long over a decade, my corporate decision makers insist that we all use Office365 subscriptions, complete with their service outages and other issues.
Without a doubt. And yet: without open source, pretty much everything digital would come to an end straight away. Sometimes what’s visible isn’t what really matters.
I have definitely seen MS Office and Visual Studio stall at a level and stay there until after they're clearly surpassed by open source competition, then they fund another round of development and ... change, some might say improve, but often it looks like change for the sake of change, especially in Office.
Has it? Jira, Teams, Slack, Google Meet, Cisco WebX... There's obviously Jitsi but I don't see companies racing towards it. When it comes to SaaS most companies prefer to pay and be done with it. Few are choosing to host open source solutions. Windows and Mac are also way more popular than Linux in office settings. With LLMs hosting it will be even more complicated because companies will have to invest heavily in GPUs.
If the bubble bursts companies will lose funds to work on new models but someone will still be able to offer existing models as a service. Companies will chose the one with better price and functionality. Being free or not will have little to do with it.
They don’t have to host it themselves. They could use a number of providers for the same model, and basically keep doing whatever they were doing with OpenAI/Anthropic via the exact same APIs.
Of course but they would have to pay for accessing it and the company with more efficient model will offer it at lower prices and most likely win customers. Having open weights doesn't change anything here.
Well, the current state is that there are a couple of "best" models, but literally hundreds of independent providers serving them. As an example, one can get GLM from its trainer, or one can get it from DigitalOcean, or Baidu, or SiliconFlow ASICs, or get it at very high speed from Cerebras, or finetune it from a number of providers, or rent the self hosting...
That's what I'm saying. The companies aren't keeping the models to themselves, and that blows the marketplace open to a boatload of competitors.
Of course it does. It prevents oligopolies.
I guess it could help limit the price gauging by the few companies that will have the best models but so would the ability to hire junior devs.
When you pay for something that means passing responsibility (liability) for that function.
Much harder to sue over free software.
Unfortunately, based on many years of experience, I have to agree. However, I also see a light at the end of the tunnel, particularly in Europe, where there is a growing desire to break free from the US SaaS stranglehold, using open source software.
Regarding OWAI I see a fundamental difference: Slack isn’t just software, it’s a hosted service with identity, storage and network effects.
An open weight model is more like a compiler: once downloaded, nobody can revoke it. You may still pay for inference, but pricing power drops when anyone can host the same model.
I'm sorry, but it took EXTREME provocation to get Europe to start to talk about moving, again. Previous starts to move to open source software across Europe have mostly faltered and reverted to the comfort of handing cash to foreign companies.
Because it was always so wonderfully easy to do nothing. Costs have risen, and new realities are increasingly being created in both politics and the economy: in France, Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and so many other places, large and small.