Yeah but who’s making the models?

They’re easily reproducible as copying and pasting. Then given you have a good enough graphics card you can just run it on your local pc completely offline.

Many groups are making models now. I see a future where we have open source data sources, models, and weights. Niche groups can extend models to be trained on whatever they want.

Mostly Chinese companies that aren’t necessarily required to generate infinitely compounding profits just to continue existing.

Edit: Also third parties such as volunteers who fine tune models for specific purposes. Just like with all software - everyone can learn and contribute when it’s open source.

I mean sure if your older machine’s newer GPU has 200 GB of VRAM to run a decent quant… Fucking hell just Q4 is around 100 gigs and then you’d want a decent amount of KV cache too.