It is surprising to me American companies completely absent from the open model space, even though we have historically seen companies doing open source.

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philipkglass 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.

https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin...

https://www.ibm.com/granite

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/

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giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.

	▲	philipkglass 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.

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ndiddy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of the main reasons why companies start new open source projects is because having a good open source option in a given category will usually push the market value of software in that category to $0, and this can be strategically valuable. For example, Google released Android as an open source operating system because they make their money from ads and data collection, not from selling operating system licenses. All the cell phone companies switched from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android, which gave Google a ton of user data to sell.

For AI, the most profitable part of the value chain is selling inference. None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0. Meanwhile, open source AI models are a huge strategic initiative for China. Having commodity Chinese models that are as good as the leading edge American models from 6 months ago forces the American companies to keep paying more and more money to train better and better models since the amount of time they can collect rent on a model they've previously trained is limited to 6 months.

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anigbrowl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The Chinese approach is reminiscent of the US spending so much on 'defense' in the 1980s that the USSR bankrupted itself trying to keep up.

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nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In business strategy terms this is known as "commoditize your complements".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

	▲	jdironman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for this article link! I had not seen it before. will be printing it off to read later.

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mullingitover 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> None of the big American companies want to release a leading edge model as open source because this would drive the price of inference to $0

Meta/Llama: "What am I, chopped liver?"

I thought the thing keeping inference above $0 was the hardware, and even if that were free there's still the tyranny of the Landauer Limit.

	▲	nradov 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Meta Llama is free for many uses but it doesn't even remotely meet the definition of "open source".
	▲	sofixa 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		When was the last Llama release? Meta have abandoned it and reportedly they've had a shift in their AI strategy.

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giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Google had to release at least the core packages in Android regardless because it is based on top of Linux and the GPL license would require it.

	▲	jraph 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But they open sourced much more than that, and under more permissive licenses. The notable exception is of course the google play services, which is also strategic (they control the OEMs with this, among other things). And the drivers, but that's mostly not them I think (they could possibly have required open source drivers though)

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an0malous 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one open sources their core competencies, GitHub never open sourced their networked filesystem and Heroku never open sourced their dyno sandboxing code. They open source ancillary tools.

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davidkwast 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As what we say here in Brazil:

"The world doesn't go round. It flips over!"

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yoyohello13 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

American companies are interested in cashing in, not making a good product.

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treis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Llama?