Cancelled all LLM subscriptions today. It's been more than two weeks since I've touched a commercial LLM. Instead, qwen3.8 27b running locally has been incredible. It's not as fast as commercial models but it's still quick and capable. It's amazing how far quantized, open models have advanced.
I'm not the only one. I open the paper today to see that corporations are making more use of them too:
This could spell huge trouble for commercial providers and their investors. I was thinking that enterprise might be an area where the advantage (so long as it exists) of frontier models is worth the expense. But even some major companies are finding open-source models capable enough.
If the future of AI turns out to be local and open, that could ripple through the rest of the economy. Trump Admin, unsurprisingly, is picking sides with the closed models:
Mark J. Remillard
But Nvidia entering it's support behind open models and it's purchase of Hugging Face certainly puts some weight is the open models corner. The question remains what Nvidia does with Hugging Face and whether it stays true to its open model and free-to-download platform.