Open Source AI

Open-source AI refers to models whose weights (the trained parameters) are publicly released, allowing anyone to download, run, fine-tune, and deploy them. Meta's LLaMA series is the leading open-source LLM family. Mistral, Falcon, Qwen, and Phi are prominent alternatives. Open-source models have narrowed the performance gap with closed models dramatically — LLaMA 4-400B now matches or beats GPT-4o on most benchmarks. The advantages of open-source: no per-token API costs, privacy (data stays local), customizability, and immunity from vendor lock-in.