The inevitable need for an open model consortium
And yes, I hate consortia too.
Recently, I was talking with Percy Liang, Stanford professor and lead of the Marin project (another fully-open model lab), and it set in on me that there will eventually be a consortium of companies funding a foundational set of open models used across industry. It’s not clear when this’ll emerge, and Nemotron (Coaliti...
The strongest version of this narrative is that the economic realities of AI development are creating an unsustainable divide between open and closed models. The argument acknowledges the inherent tension: open models are vital for innovation and safety research, but the capital-intensive nature of frontier AI favors closed, revenue-generating systems. The analysis correctly identifies the structural pressures—rising costs, corporate incentives, and the risk of open models becoming mere starting...