It is clear open source models and harnesses are having a moment. There’s a few factors at work.
1/ It is now obvious that you can catch up to near-SOTA performance and do so with a clear training lineage. See Thinking Machines Inkling launch today.
2/ There are several well-funded, talented teams building open weight models now in the US and abroad. Along with the explosion of other near SOTA models (Grok/Cursor, Muse Spark), it is clear we are going to have a diverse ecosystem of models at least on coding and agentic use.
3/ Organizations are increasingly looking for control over how their data is used and are willing to trade off some access to frontier level tokens for this control. Organizations and countries are increasingly nervous about the frontier labs potentially competing with them down the road and don’t want their data to enable a future competitor.
4/ Open source is a slider: you could bring your own open harness, your evals, your business context and are free to pick and choose your model of choice.
5/ Companies have now actively shifted from “how do we get our people to use tokens” to being uncomfortable with their token cost ballooning without a clear line to revenue.
6/ Geo-politically, countries will be weighing open weight models as a way to get frontier-level tokens inside controlled environments that may not be otherwise possible.
All of this leads to more choice for all of us!