Open Source AI: What It Means for the Future of Software
Open source AI is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot without much explanation of what it actually changes for regular people. Here is a practical breakdown. If you want background on how today's AI assistants actually work, our breakdown of ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude covers the basics of how these models are trained before we get into what 'open' really means. What Open Source AI Actually Is At its core, an open source AI model means the underlying weights, and sometimes the training code, are published for anyone to download, run, and modify. This sounds simple but the implications are significant. Before open models, useful AI was locked inside a handful of companies. Every serious application depended on calling their paid APIs . Open source changes that by letting developers run capable models on their own hardware, for free. What You Can Do With It The most obvious use case is cost control. Startups and hobbyists can run an open model on their o...