Open Weight Models
topic on 6 shows · 19 statements across 16 episodes
David Senra 
Latent Space 
No Priors 
the a16z Podcast 
Big Technology 
20VC
19 statements about Open Weight Models, every show
Greze: Open-weight models already perform routine human-level tasks really well
“Scheduling movies, working with one's calendar, answering emails that have been answered before, doing research on competitors on a daily basis. Like, all these kinds of things, I think, are trending pretty far from the frontier, right? And you can already use…”
Greze: Moving to open-weight models improves COGS without providing product advantage
“I can improve our cogs by moving to open weight, but it doesn't give me much product advantage. It doesn't make my product work better.”
Katz: Enterprise indemnification requirements will limit open-weight model adoption
“I don't, because I think it, especially in the enterprise, they want provisions and protections that potentially open weight models, especially those that come out of China, cannot provide. Around indemnification, for example, and output inference, and it's go…”
Katz: Open-weight AI security concerns will be addressed in 1-2 years
“Today, I think it is. If I look out a year or two from now, I think a lot of these concerns will be addressed.”
O'Driscoll: Open-weight AI enabling tech is at peak valuation moment
“If you are an enabling technology for open-weight models, now is peak moment.”
Acharya: Open-weight models are optimal for bounded-upside enterprise tasks like finance
“Conversely, when you talk about something like finance, you know, the best way to close the books is accurately. You can't close it, you know, 10 X better than accurately. So as a result, you kind of have this bounded upside problem where it makes sense to use…”
Atallah: Use open-weight models for deterministic tasks and frontier orchestrators for reasoning
“This is what open weight models are generally really good at compared to frontier models. When you have a deterministic task where you know the shape of the output, you know the type of problem that you're working on, and it's a type of problem that has been s…”
O'Driscoll: Open-weight models act as a price drag on closed AI models
“One of the really interesting things about these open weight models is the impact they're having and the ability to be a drag on price for the US, you know, closed source frontier model companies.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic is pushing policies to de facto ban open-weight models
“While they're not saying they want to ban these things, they're advocating a series of steps that would add up to de facto banning or at least slowing them down.”
Stamos: Fine-Tuning Open AI Models for Cyberattacks Costs Only Thousands
“If you take those models and you bring them into your own lab and you have a training set of labeled vulnerabilities, if you have a cyber gym, then you can make them much better yourself. And the amount of resources it takes to do that is not extremely high. I…”
Stamos: Open-Weight AI Protections Are Easily 'Abliterated' on Hugging Face
“Like a bunch of openweight models have been trained with protections, but you can obliterate those out and you can go on hugging face and look for obliterate and you will find a zillion models where people have removed the protections.”
Glyman: Open-weight models match frontier AI within six months at 1% cost
“What we've observed is about six months after the latest and greatest model comes out, you'll have an open weight model that is just as good and maybe costs, right, one 100th to go and use it”
Mignano: USV is investing heavily in open-source AI and agents
“At USV, we're really interested in the Rebel Alliance. This new universe of open weight models and open source harnesses and distributed compute and agents, right? Human aligned agents.”
Stamos: US CIOs contract Chinese open-weight models as backups against regulation
“And so now, this week, CIs and CTOs are signing contracts to have open weight models on different hosts, on U.S. Hosts. They're not using Chinese hosts, but they're using Chinese models on as backups through LLM routers because political risk Is now a risk of …”
Nadella: Many open-weight models look good on benchmarks but fail in practice
“In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open-weight models is they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice.”
Andrew Ng: Open-weight AI models are a tremendous source of geopolitical influence
“I think that open-weight models is a tremendous source of geopolitical influence.”
Chiang: Vicuna Showed Open-Weight Models Could Match ChatGPT Quality
“And people were very excited about it because it kind of like demonstrate open way model can reach this conversation capability similar to ChatGPT.”
Khan: Open-weight AI models drive innovation by lowering startup costs
“I've spoken out in favor of open weight models and wanting to make sure that in as much as you have layers of the stack where there could be risks of depriving some of these companies of key inputs actually having open weight models can be just such a key driv…”
Kolter: Closed-source models leading open-weight releases creates a necessary safety buffer
“At least for now, there's a constant stream of closed models that are released sometime before an equivalently capable open, open weight model, right? And I think this is actually a very good thing because my hope would be that, and we've sort of found ourselv…”