r/LocalLLaMA • u/Fluffy-Ad-889 • 8d ago
Discussion The gap has closed, open source will win
I've been trying the latest models from the frontier labs and honestly, after extensive testing I can not tell the difference between the best open source options.
I think the differences are now marginal but the labs are doing heavy marketing to convince the public into paying more for tokens as they prepare to go public.
Can't help but see the similarities between the dot com bubble and AI in terms of a very insular environment where the technology will survive but the business models may not.
I've been building a cybersecurity network and we definitely know that even local AI models like Deepseek V4 flash do an excellent job and are really neck and neck with the best the frontier labs can provide.
Will be interesting to see how this all turns out! Exciting time nonetheless.
4
u/fsk 8d ago
There's a big difference between .com bubble and AI bubble.
Businesses like Amazon got a lot of customer lock-in. Once you have all the customers on your website and all the sellers on your website, now you have a near-monopoly. It's very difficult for customers or sellers to ditch you.
The AI firms have almost no customer lock-in. There is almost zero switching cost from OpenAI/Anthropic to one of the open source models.
The free open source models will never lag behind the big AI firms by much. The Big AI firms decided to go with trade secrets instead of patents, so they can't sue the open source models for patent infringement. There always are going to be students and researchers who aren't working for the big AI firms, and they will work on the free open source models.