alt Hacker NewsWhat are the different business models for open-weight AI companies?
Replies
Just serving the model over API seems like a natural fit and is what many of them are doing. So simply being the cloud provider for your own open weight model can be a source of revenue
Maybe the thesis is that
Open source low cost models will dominate most enterprise tasks as cost curves will dictate usage. TM is trying to replicate that especially as the US and China gets more defensive with their tech
Similar to companies working on FOSS codebases, hosting (sometimes with the license restricting third-parties in some way), providing tailored models and services to customer's and getting bought for your team if your model happens to be competitive enough.
- inference
- RLaaS (Tinker, or the more involved FDE motion a la Reflection / Applied Compute)
For thinking machines, they provide super simple finetuning APIs.
if it is their model, they can have more lower level integrations for that. Thinking machines might be the only large lab in the US to have business interest aligned with open sourcing strong models that are customizable.