I’m kind of new to local AI and wondering what’s the move here? Are they trying to pull off a chrome/android situation? Obviously I don’t trust any of these gafam giants but I would be really interested in running a local LLM on my M1 max (briefly used deepseek last year). My use case would be mostly chat functions to help with academic and text analysis tasks (don’t worry I don’t just blindly trust LLMs, I know what I’m doing), so recommendations are welcome.
A lot has been said, but to add to the list I’d say it gives them access to quite a large pool of free testers.
LLM architectures and optimization techniques change rapidly and by releasing open-weight models a lot of enthusiasts will evaluate new models for free, help implement support in inference engines, catch bugs etc. (and in turn, ofc, get a new model to run for free, so it’s at least somewhat symbiotic).
We have at least seen this quite obviously when Alibaba released Qwen3-Next, which was a somewhat undertrained but still useful model which introduced the architecture that their latest models now use “in production” (also their paid “Max” models).