alt Hacker NewsI play with the small open weight models and I disagree. They are fun, but they are not in the same class as hosted models running on big hardware.
If some organization forbade external models they should invest in the hardware to run bigger open models. The small models are a waste of time for serious work when there are more capable models available.
Most organizations aren't going to need the wide breadth of capabilities of the frontier models. They're risk averse and LLMs are non-deterministic, so use cases are typically more tightly scoped to tasks that involve nuanced classification that small models can easily handle even if it takes a little fine-tuning on your organizations data.