alt Hacker NewsGreat to see more fully open LLMs.
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.
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> We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs
I disagree with this use of SOTA, and this topic is why.
Anthropic and OpenAI have “cutting-edge” models. These are beyond the state of the art but they are closed, secretive, hard to quantify.
The “state of the art” is open source, open weights models that can be inspected, studied, shared and critiqued, because that is what is meant by “the art” —- it is the knowledge and principles and evidence and materials available to all. The “state of the art” is the highest point of that.
I wish we could make this distinction and stop blessing two secretive, unverifiable loss-making companies with so much power.
(Putting that aside, I suspect — without evidence, mind you - that the endless march to solving models by making them bigger is not the solution anyway.)
> China's distillation labs
This notion that Chinese labs are merely distilling frontier models is quite an unwarranted slur. Those labs have published WAY more useful research than US labs on RL techniques, novel model architectures, training pipelines, etc. They have also hit intelligence-per-parameter densities that US labs have yet to attain.
Apart from that, merely training a model on outputs from another model, off policy and without the logits, doesn’t really work that well.
The Chinese labs know how to build frontier level models. GLM-5.2 shows that they no longer even need Nvidia chips to do it.