alt Hacker NewsPeople keep saying this about open weight models but I haven’t heard of any real companies any of my friends work at willing to switch over to them.
My company buys Claude because it’s a trusted name with a user-friendly interface and integrations with a lot of business apps.
This “open weight models will take over based on price” is analogous saying that Linux and LibreOfficr will displace Windows and Microsoft Office in the workplace because they’re drastically cheaper.
Another analogy is that people talk a lot about the resurgence of audio CDs, but if you look at sales numbers it’s about 4% of peak audio CD sales from the year 2000. Sometimes in society a trend is more that people keep saying that a trend is happening rather than a trend is really happening.
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> This “open weight models will take over based on price” is analogous saying that Linux and LibreOfficr will displace Windows and Microsoft Office in the workplace because they’re drastically cheaper.
You can't just literally drop LibreOffice into an organization and have it automatically and seamlessly work.
LLMs are, definitionally, fungible. Their input is tokens. Their output is tokens. They have minor variations in chat templates and can be trained to perform better in a particular harness (like training GPT in Codex).
Do you or your friends at work use redis? Postgres? Are they hosted at "Redis Inc" and "Postgres Inc"? No, they're commodities hosted at a huge number of places.
I went from using Anthropic via API daily to using Kimi K3 (now 3.1 pro) daily, only going back to Anthropic when a refactor is too much for Kimi to handle (once in a month's worth of work).
That surprised me. I didn't expect K3 to be as good as it was and now with 3.1, it's clear (imo) that the gap is closing. Anthropic still has a minor edge but from the 'feel' of these open models, that gap is negligible, not a moat.
They don't need to "switch" over to them. They just need to stop using frontier models for everything. And I can assure you most big tech companies are already deploying open-weight models and telling their employees to use them more.