alt Hacker News"open weight" models are not open source. They are still deeply proprietary. It is not possible to know what they do or what they are capable of without interrogating them since we have no access to their source materials.
The only difference is the Chinese labs have allowed 3rd party inference providers run the proprietary models for them since they cannot do it themselves due to domestic GPU compute constraints.
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Keep seeing this trope again and again. By same logic are open source code "open source"? If we don't see the development environment attached to these projects, are they truly open source? Heck, why not include software philosophy and methodology and the Jira board including the book that inspired the architecture?
The argument is an endless slope and as such essentially pointless.
It would be awesome to have actual open source (and open weights) models! I hope someone will make a real go of this at some point.
I...don't follow. How in the world does your comment about open weight and open source relate? Ignoring that it has nothing to do with this post (did you mean to reply to someone), are you aware that Anthropic, OpenAI and others allow 3rd party inference providers to run their proprietary models? Like, what does this non-sequitur even mean?
You understand Moonshot AI could have had other parties run inference for them without releasing the weights, right? These two points are utterly unrelated, unless you think Fable and GPT5-6 are also "open weight" because other providers are providing inference?
Further, having access to the source material in no universe allows you to know what a model is "capable of". I'm not sure how this follows.
China has published more research papers than America with regards to AI training and inference optimizations and methods.
You are correct that they aren't completely open source, but the alternative is the American method, getting drip fed a ChatGPT OSS model every 12 months which cannot do basic programming.
>The only difference is the Chinese labs have allowed 3rd party inference providers run the proprietary models for them since they cannot do it themselves due to domestic GPU compute constraints.
I'm not sure this is entirely true either. Kimi K3 was released and for two weeks existed only via Moonshots API / Subscription. Openrouter reports 250B+ tokens a day for 11 days straight. I would assume they are processing over 1T tokens a day if you include direct API and their subscription.