> The same business model that Deepseek is using.

there is a chance their business model is absorbing government funding..

So they're constantly hemorrhaging their most valuable clients?

Tech history is littered with the corpses of "open source but we sell hosting" services. Models are so expensive to train, you can't be losing the big clients once they get super profitable.

SFT/RL can be done without parent company.

Considering how volatile things can get depending on who's president, I'd say even American companies need to "compete against America" if they don't want to get their rug pulled from under them (which, apparently, the legal system allows to easily happen in the US).

The story of Reflection AI is supposedly that the company was faffing and failing at winning in the coding agent space, but was introduced to Jenson, who suggested they build an open-weight model and said he would fund it. That turned into a $2 billion financing with NVIDIA doing roughly $500 million and was a complete pivot.

I think the bet would have to be that a US Open Weight company either: 1. Gets a lot of money from Jenson who views them as a counterbalance to the big labs in his ecosystem and a way to generate leverage (the same way he is positioning neoclouds-- it also could be synergistic with neoclouds who could offer the model serving endpoints) 2. Can fast follow the same way Mistral does (which, honestly, seems like just distilling the Chinese model, which distills the US lab but is pretty innovative on a whole lot of architecture both in training and serving land.) 3. AND figure out some (maybe not super lucrative but lucrative enough) sort of business model, as well. There are lots of possible business models, so I will be curious how this whole space evolves.

I have a similar bet. Looks like people don't like this idea. You got downvoted a lot.

This is a great point