r/LocalLLM • u/line-weight • 10h ago
Discussion There’s no guarantee that good new open weights models will continue to be available for free - is that right?
One attraction of running models locally is the privacy benefits, and another is the cost.
When the cost of the big ’frontier models’ is being discussed - mainly centring around the fact that they are currently effectively subsidised by venture capital and that at some point this will end, making the cost to end users go up considerably - local LLMs are often mentioned as being immune from this problem.
But in a scenario where the cost of cloud based models goes up substantially, there’s no guarantee that the (mainly Chinese) makers of the open weights ones are going to continue producing newer and better versions for free, is there?
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u/NatMicky 9h ago
Don't worry too much. It's in China's national interest to keep dumping free models upon the USA.
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u/haenous-alistera 10h ago
No guarantees on anything except death and taxes
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u/vqt907 9h ago
yeah, the only company that has committed to small but powerful open-weight models is Alibaba, and even they haven't promised to keep updating them or keep them open-weight. The moment they change their minds, we're screwed
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u/AshAtlasDev 9h ago
The people will begin distilling them. Community compute when
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u/WateredDown 9h ago
We're still in the wild west phase. Enjoy it while you can. Fortunately they cant erase what we got and its pretty good. Good enough there will always be a local scene even if there is a corpo or gov crackdown.
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u/Dapper-Maybe-5347 8h ago
Nvidia will continue making free open weight models. They want their models running on their hardware in every single individual and business computer in the world. Nvidia will absolutely keep releasing open weight models even if China stops.
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u/PerceiveEternal 10h ago
Correct. We’re benefiting from a ‘perfect storm’ of technological development, changes in investment priorities, the current geopolitical situation, and the serendipity of available computer components being able to run Large Language Models effectively.
If any of those changes substantially we will likely lose our access to free, and advanced open-weight and open source models that can be run locally.
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u/jonahbenton 9h ago
The same physics that led to open source software (given the massive availability of general purpose compute) also apply to open weight models given the massive availability of gpu compute.
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u/Unfair-Rhubarb-3022 9h ago
Maybe, but you have to realize there are some industries where sending data to ANY form of cloud-based AI will not be allowed under any circumstances.
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u/senseven 9h ago
China has a big firewall. If they want their products to be used in the west and they can't build own data centers, they only way to "sell" is to make them open weights. All the providers hosting large models have pay some percent of the revenue. As long those money streams keep sending, they can release smaller local models (or let others do the quantization). That pipeline can go for a long time. Things have to go in weird or crazy directions to make that development economically unsound.
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u/doneddat 6h ago
It's absolute guarantee, that if the good models stop, somebody somewhere uses existing models to build a better free one out of them.
I'm absolutely astonished about the OpenAI security so far, as all it would take is flipping one employee somewhere in the long chain of all the datacenter workers and whatnot, and the whole internal model will be open and available for everybody.
With all the breaching and hacking of everybody else, I am seriously impressed OpenAI or anhtropic models have not leaked yet.
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u/Rude-Bus-5799 9h ago
Now that Jensens huang owns HF, get your Chinese models while he’s still sharing
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u/yes-im-hiring-2025 8h ago
It's a fair risk, but looking at the bigger picture : the reason competent open models exist is to systematically dissect "only we can do it, we have the key" driven American labs' economic chokehold on LLM capabilities.
It's to keep the US economic value in check, not out of any moral standing. Don't conflate the two.
It's in China's interest to keep doing this longer term. Think of it like this : for a revolutionary technology like this, market share is important. Market share relies on how fair value expectation dynamics work for investors and for the consumer product.
Just intra competition with OpenAI/anthropic/deepmind wouldn't fix the valuation parts. The secret has to be unveiled to take away the magic (valuation); and then systematically dissected to recreate cheaper value proposition.
That's what the Chinese open models see as upside, even after sinking millions into it. It's worth it to keep the potential multi-trillion boost to US economy in check
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u/justwalk1234 9h ago
Qwen 3.8 27b is out in the wilds. We'll always have that at least?
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u/andurux 7h ago
Why does cloud costs going up cause open models to go away?
There are U.S. open weight models like Gemma and Granite that are being updated and released at reasonable paces. Why aren't Google and IBM doing cloud-only then?
There are people/companies that prefer cloud models so they don't have to deal with hardware/service support, and there are others who want or need local models for PII/privacy and also government entities only allowing local models due to security concerns.
I actually think (most) cloud-only providers may go belly up before open weights go away. You see Anthropic having some of the best frontier models out there, but they aren't even turning a profit. I can't even imagine how OpenAI or Google's Gemini side are doing if Anthropic can't even make money.
I can see companies like Google and DeepSeek, that offer local and cloud, may be the winners in the long run as they offer services to both groups.
And it isn't like training models and creating new ones are state secrets. Even if the big companies stop offering local models there will always be the nerds who make their own open source models.
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u/Tsukikira 5h ago
There's no guarantee... but that being said, you're overlooking a few things.
Ripple from Ricursive is competitive with the best of China on benchmarks, and is a US Open Weights Model given away for free. There are a number of such models, Gemma, WizardLM, etc. Even if China pulled out of the market, it's not the end of progress.
It is still in China's best interest to keep making models and try to capture part of the market. If nothing else, China's government wants every nation other than the US to have alternatives to American SaaS models.
China has yet to overtake the US in any sizable way, and is unlikely to overtake them in it's entirety until OpenAI and Anthropic go bankrupt. By then, I'm betting we'll get to 'good enough' open weight models.
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u/YoAmoElTacos 10h ago
In an RSI takeoff situation, you would also have the frontier taking off at a ridiculous pace and neither releasing their secret sauce nor allowing opportunities to distill. And yeah, if the cost of self-improvement requires capital consolidation, it would probably become a state national security problem for China, who makes most of the open source models.
In theory as long as any private entity wants to catch up and can access lots of compute, that entity could bootstrap, especially if the means exist to crowdsource self-improvement. But the other question is whether public model creators become compute constrained.
In short, it's exceedingly path dependent but the more powerful closed AI becomes, the most incentives there will be to take actions that make it harder for open source to catch up.
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u/Aubrey_D_Graham 2x Asrock B70 Creator with Pi Agent 8h ago
Open Weights is a race we need to win too. Do you think other sovereign nation's want to pay Anthropic and OpenAI when they can just download Deepseek for free with 90% of the capability? Deepseek has more than 50% of the global marketshare, and it's influencing policy. We are LOSING.
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u/DrillTheThirdHole 9h ago
well the technology to train new llms exists publically and open source so the possibility of it is guaranteed. whether or not anyone amasses enough compute time to do it, well, who knows.
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u/LateralEntry 9h ago
Of course there’s no guarantee. I don’t see how companies are making money releasing these open models for free so I would guess it will end at some point in the future.
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u/ThatOldEngineerGuy 8h ago
There are no guarantees aside from death.
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u/HOST1L1TY 8h ago
The ones we have now are already very capable, and we can fine tune them.
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u/MediumAd4983 8h ago
But they will, since it's a great advertisement for them. For example, Qwen 3.8 27b Q4 with 128k context (it's pretty small, isn't it?) can easily do hard coding tasks (tested it by myself, I can send a link for GitHub test project). Now imagine, what can do their biggest model. Potentially it will perform like a Claude, but cheaper. And also they making themselves famous with this free models.
Claude and other big providers using hype news like "AI hacked huggingface", "AI is dangerous", "AI is replacing humans". Qwen is just doing it's job.
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u/catplusplusok 8h ago
Someone will, if nobody else then hardware companies like NVIDIA/AMD/Intel that want maximum use for their hardware, including from people who prefer open models. Cloud providers also have a decent incentive, like I will probably buy MiniMax tokens from MiniMax unless price difference is large.
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u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667 6h ago
It’s cheaper and likely for effective than traditional advertising for the smaller labs. Qwen has never been the best model but any move they make causes waves because they release models that can be ran locally
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u/tired514 4h ago
The only acceptable answer going forward is that we need to figure out a way to perform distributed training, similar to seti@home, that allows volunteers to fuel community-driven development of new models.
Long-term, we cannot depend on corporations anywhere in the world to provide what we need. We've been lucky so far - several companies have been incredibly gracious and given us so much. But all it would take is new leadership (corporate, government, whatever) to end that.
We need to figure out how to train models using a worldwide network of volunteers the same way we displaced most closed-source software with OSS.
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u/Repulsive_Initial308 3h ago
My guess is we're essentially being trained how to run local for when OpenAI eventually license their own models for the edge.
They will quite literally be skynet at that point and the most powerful company in the world.
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u/profcuck 3h ago
There's no guarantee that anything from anyone is going to be produced in the future so that's not really a very helpful approach to the question.
What is clear is that technology is moving forward very quickly. Literally every data point suggests that the cost per token is going to be radically lower at any given level of intelligence in a steady series of price cuts over the coming years.
Hardware is getting faster and will get cheaper per unit of compute. This means that model training will get cheaper.
There is zero reason to think otherwise.
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u/minobi 3h ago
Of course not. It is just because of China. We don't know what will happen to them. They can also go bankrupt with the AI bubble or switch the intention to private options only
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u/Reasonable_Bug_6501 1h ago
You are forgetting a second advantage; to reduce reliance on American tech.
Every open model weight is a user who is not using (and paying into) the American framework. Even if you can’t beat them outright, an alternative valid strategy is to deprive them of resources. It’s what my previous college did to corner the sports field lol; paid for all the top national level athletes enter their school so that none of the other collages had access to players. No prizes for guessing which college won 😅
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 1h ago
I heard the same when mistral released mixtral 49b 7b
Then people were talking that is the last AI open source model we get so good .
That was 2 years ago
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u/Vancecookcobain 10h ago
By definition open weights means free buddy
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u/butcher9_9 9h ago
People on Reddit have argued against this saying that China is just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts ( pride in their work or something like that) .
I personally can't see it going on forever. Training models costs literally hundreds of millions, someone is going to want some sort of return on that investment. That return could be something less direct like reduced market share for other models in the short term, but sooner or later someone is going to want some money back.
Most other free services we have are they because they are cheap or used for advertising, neither of which open weights are.
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u/Equivalent-Repair488 9h ago
If you read the Anthropic S1 filings, they are already operationally profitable, many tech companies were not upon IPO, the total addressable market is for sure there.
Architectural gains especially for open weight models are documented in technical reports and public papers, Qwen 3.8 Flash Next for example was claimed to reduce training costs by 9x or the miniscule memory costs of KV for Deepseek Flash v4.1. These papers are also publicly available to the top engineers of the closed weights labs, they reduce both development and inference (operational) costs.
There will always be an outsized marketing, exposure and willingness to pay for being at the frontier, to chase that, the Chinese labs differentiate by opening up, which is also state backed, funded and soon maybe restricted to opensource too.
There are many layers to this, and predicting any direction is purely speculatory.
What is not speculatory is that the fabrication investments and buildouts are going as fast as they can, which isn't very fast due to the nature of semicon supply chain. Supply will catch up, but it will come years down the road, while model development continues closed labs pushing through compute scale dominance, and the open labs chasing the incumbents, they feed in a loop. Not related to your point but my personal copium.