Big day for open source Chinese model releases - DeepSeek-v3-0324 came out today too, an updated version of DeepSeek v3 now under an MIT license (previously it was a custom DeepSeek license). https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/
Pretty soon I won't be using any American models. It'll be a 100% Chinese open source stack.
The foundation model companies are screwed. Only shovel makers (Nvidia, infra companies) and product companies are going to win.
I still don't get where the money for new open source models is going to come from once setting investor dollars on fire is no longer a viable business model. Does anyone seriously expect companies to keep buying and running thousands of ungodly expensive GPUs, plus whatever they spend on human workers to do labelling/tuning, and then giving away the spoils for free, forever?
There are lots of open-source projects that took many millions of dollars to create. Kubernetes, React, Postgres, Chromium, etc. etc.
This has clearly been part of a viable business model for a long time. Why should LLM models be any different?