If open weight models are the future, U.S. AI companies are going to have a hard time

I ran DeepSeek and Llama and Mistral at home on my consumer grade gaming PC.

With a little tweaking of the system prompts and configuring web search, I was running a local LLM that felt pretty darn close to the commercial LLMs.

With this technology out in the open internet where you can download the models in a few hours I don’t see how the commercial AI companies are going to last. If selling “Artificial Intelligence” subscriptions is all your company does for revenue, you’re screwed.

I downloaded and ran an LLM that I could have a conversation with and feed basic coding problems to for basically zero dollars and ran it on my puny gaming machine…puny compared to enterprise-class hardware. It would be trivial for a company with a very moderate budget to buy some servers and start running their own LLMs that they can use to feed all the PII and HIPPA data they want.

And Llama and Mistral are ancient history at this point.

The cutting edge of local is lightyears better now. It’s basically where ChatGPT/Anthropic were not that long ago, with a bit less world knowledge because of the size.

Thanks for the info. I don’t follow it closely but afaik wasn’t Mistral the only western open weight model around?