I think a problem with open-weight models is that while you can improve them, you are not going to create the next generation of LLMs by fine-tuning. We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs. For example, Anthropic recently started requiring identity verification for Claude [0], same for OpenAI [1].
If one day China's distillation labs stop releasing their LLMs as open-weight, I doubt American labs will continue to release free LLM weights without that competition.
That's where fully open pipelines shine: they enable the community to create the next generation of SOTA LLMs. That is the only way LLMs truly become sovereign.
I think a problem with open-weight models is that while you can improve them, you are not going to create the next generation of LLMs by fine-tuning. We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs. For example, Anthropic recently started requiring identity verification for Claude [0], same for OpenAI [1].
If one day China's distillation labs stop releasing their LLMs as open-weight, I doubt American labs will continue to release free LLM weights without that competition.
That's where fully open pipelines shine: they enable the community to create the next generation of SOTA LLMs. That is the only way LLMs truly become sovereign.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618455
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618606