I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.

Yes, you can. There are multiple inference providers out there. The problem is, it’s hard to beat the Chinese providers in cost. And you also have to compete with frontier model providers’ subsidized offerings.

Here's a free startup idea: operate an open-weight model service, and offer "Verified AI Integrity," which signs the input tokens, the seed for the randomness in selecting outputs, and the model ID, proving that the result of the call to AI was completely "organic" and was not interfered with.

Your main audience would be snake oil salesmen trying to prove their AI products are unbiased and not under the thumb of any outside influence. This doesn't address the biases of the model itself, but that's not your business. Your business is selling tokens and security certificates. If you can get the right angel investor, you could maybe have your new standard required for some government applications.

There are plenty of US-based inference providers available, including AWS, that serve Chinese models at competitive prices (vs frontier US models). They also have lots of usage. Not necessarily for coding, but for other enterprise tasks.

It's called AWS. Bedrock is right there. Price or data policy is never the issue. The models themselves are the problem -- most large US companies are not going to touch them.

Source: directly involved in these discussions. You can downvote as much as you'd like but you can't ignore the facts.