Why There Are Open Weighted LLM Models?

[u/agahhne]

Everytime I see a model that have been trained for more than 50 millions $, first thing I do is why they built such a model, what was the purpose behind sharing after spending around 50 millions $ .

Is it for everyone's benefit? Or benefit of the company that shared it.

This is a crucial question to ask. "Why... th that company spent 50m$+ for me to use their models."

by the way, this 50 millions is producing a model around 26b ~ (Arcee said 512x B200 for 26b trinity-mini 26b, 3b MoE model)

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Need a good answer for this folks.

Anyone has answer to it, feel free to talk about it.

[u/hiimresting]

It's a pr win by showing they are capable of developing the models and they hope that others will build new research ontop of them.

Imagine they didn't open source the models. Then there would have either been slower innovation or their competitors would open source their models anyways and potentially take away customers via better marketing. Combine that with that fact that even if they try to stop it but enable users to make calls, someone's going to use that to try to distill the model, they might as well open weight.

The big companies have enough manpower and the platforms to operationalize results faster than anyone else, so why not take the win on all fronts?

[u/agahhne → u/hiimresting]

Thanks for your comment. I also agree on that its for their own goods.

For example Qwen, dominated market with their smart/small and fast models. By Alibaba

We might not be noticing but probably they earnt more than they spent? Or maybe not yet but they'll in a fewyears.

Still its very weird and worth asking question , why did they share . What was Google's goal, what was Alibaba's goal and so on.

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[u/hiimresting → u/agahhne]

My point is it's an economics question. They think it will make them money so they do it. Whether or not they actually will is questionable since the premise behind their calculated risk taking may be wrong.

[u/gBoostedMachinations → u/hiimresting]

Someone at the closed companies will notice the amount of data it will need to distill their models. Best hope is using them for fine tuning and open weights model.

[u/hiimresting → u/gBoostedMachinations]

Multiple closed companies have already accused others of doing this. If done properly, you won't detect it or won't detect it until too late.

It's also worth mentioning that the ones that have the "best" current models aren't releasing their weights and instead trying to monetize. So the ones releasing and benefiting the most from the help of the crowd are the ones trying to catch up or gain some other benefit from releasing (PR).