He notes OpenAI and Google can implement this approach.
the most humanity-aligned business model for a frontier lab is recursive self-commoditization
keep the big models closed, enable distillation into open models from the same family, capture value on both sides
both openai and google could do this. enterprises would love it.
Positive users see frontier labs keeping core models closed while enabling open distillations as a path to moats, cleaner production, and useful platforms, while some call current open model work wasteful and redundant.
enterprise saas system-of-record that facilitates all of this, with lock-in friction in the right places, a la databricks/aws/vercel
if the only authorized way to distill gpt-6 into gpt-oss-120b, reasoning and all, is the OpenAI Training Platform, and the easiest cheapest way to do optimized on-prem inference is the OpenAI Inference Engine with a paid license needed for the fast kernels, everyone would just do that
@willccbb what's the value capture on the oss side?
@willccbb what's the value capture on the oss side?
the issue with gpt-oss and gemma is that they were side quests done for goodwill, not part of the core strategy
if anthropic starts pulling away with market share, this button becomes more appealing to press
@willccbb Openai really can make this into a bigger moat of all time to go with an open models approach and better capabilities
@willccbb the good ending
@willccbb Why would OpenAI press this button
@willccbb theres an incredible amount of wasted money going into redundant open models. open source community would be better served by some kind of DAO that raises money for a frontier training run
@willccbb Distillation-as-product also gives a cleaner path from discovery to production: frontier model for exploration, open descendant for hardening and cost control. The hard part is labs treating margin compression as strategy.
He notes OpenAI and Google can implement this approach.
the most humanity-aligned business model for a frontier lab is recursive self-commoditization
keep the big models closed, enable distillation into open models from the same family, capture value on both sides
both openai and google could do this. enterprises would love it.