Training a frontier model is prohibitively expensive, so it’s understandable that open weights aren’t truly open source. In fact, I worry whether open weights will even survive[1] once the current AI cycle cools down. An even bigger issue is that as long as model development remains this capital intensive, a genuinely open-source community around frontier AI is virtually impossible. That will have massive implications for our careers. The more capital concentrates at the top, the less leverage we’ll have in the job market.
[1] Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand. That said, I'm not sure how sustainable and sufficient that incentive can be.
Whether it's feasible to release everything under open terms is actually a different issue from whether they're being truthful in how they're advertising it.
Not speaking on behalf of my employer and I have no insight into this strategy at all, but I feel like the sale of consumer GPUs is so small by comparison to data centers (more than 10x from what I can tell online) that more users of open weights wouldn't likely make much difference in the earnings report.
In the future, even consumers will launch weights and fine tunes they own in the cloud.
People don't own the fiber to their home, so why should they expect to run the GPUs? If they want smart coding and video models, they'll need H200s and B200s, and they'll need to rent them.
I expect to continue to have this, and more, as smaller models become even more capable. I also expect hardware prices to resume going down once the supply crunch ends.
I see no need to stop owning things or change my expectations around ownership, nor will I accept something like that.
This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.
Kimi/GLM/etc basically all have this. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their own hearts.
Call it free, available, downloadable etc, but not "Open".
Either way, Mistral is a failing company with little relevance in the AI space and that's not going to save them.
Already ? I was wondering when some US based company will buy them including all that "soverignity" prompts :)
Local llms are what we need and to get that we need memory so we need computer builders from outside of US. Why ? Because when something external appears US companies also allows US citizens to have that too at lower price :) Not before external forces force them to be suddenly good hearted to their own peoples...
Can we also have coarser MoE's ? If I want to code I do not need llm be trained on past and present capitol names and chemistry and everything unrelevant to the task ! Watch Matrix again ! We need somewhat "inteligent" llms and knowledge can be uploaded just like Neo learned kung-fu :) - prompts and light tr^h^hweek of learning and some exams, we need kind of university for llms :) So llms finally fit into users computers... And when some grandmas or snowflakes start to whine tell them to learn - llms usage can be a skill finally ;)
Edit:
Wait, can we have something like interchengable weights so knowledge can be just downloaded to model folder ? Common weights format ? Reproducible builds ?
Surely they'll outcompete everyone on cost alone
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/08/17/ai-comp...
https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition
Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.
Now we have these "open inspired but not open" licensed weights and they want to keep the term.
I'll stick with DS4.1 flash. Open and capable
Yes it does. It might have requirements that you release the code for any changes you make to it or link with it. But no OSI (or FSF) approved license prohibits you from using it commercially.
No major Chinese or Western labs satisfy these requirements. The only vendors I can think of that do are Nvidia and Allen AI.
Their technical report on the release is excellent: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
They're a public research institute as opposed to one of the proprietary frontier labs, but they've been very open about the science.
It's just that their models were never frontier-level. By major, I meant frontier or popular.
Open models we have now will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.
I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.
The fear you're sharing has been shared since day 1 of open-weight models and it has yet to come to fruition.
Further, regardless of what any of these labs license their model as, the end user who has downloaded the weights can still use them for virtually any purpose (synthetic data, classification, etc) as much as they want and there is no way to reasonably enforce a license on those outputs.
So even if you can't run a service using this model's weights (without a license), the weights still do provide utility for training new models with any other license.
*Edit, responding to the replies: Constraints give rise to ingenuity. Who knows how we'll be training models in the future. Hopefully in a distributed fashion, maybe with some kind of consensus-driven training dataset selection. Crowd funding, etc. There's too many people that want this, and the knowledge on how to do it is out there (many times by now)
It's only happening now because labs have bucket tons of VC cash to burn and need a big public flex to raise more cash, or because they're subsidised by the Chinese government. I'm not massively confident either of those will stay true forever.
"outpaced by SOTA" doesn't matter at all, the models we have are plenty good enough for most real tasks.
Peer production processes (like open source) require that the inputs be specialized knowledge and relatively small amounts of capital.
must not be linked, or must be capable of separation without losing their informative content;
must be organised according to specific criteria, which means that only planned collections are covered;
must be individually accessible – mere storage of data is not covered by the term database."
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/regional...?
However, there is a more straightforward solution. The allows general use inside a company. The license blocks the "Model-as-a-Service".
So instead, any GPU holder can provide a 'Infrastructure-as-a-service' and have clients provide the model, and then tell the clients that as an optimization they can also provide just the hash and they'll load it from their memory.
I think its good that this license pushes the ecosystem towards such a generic-utility framework, but as a moat to protect a business its banking on most companies being lazy and wasteful.
That pays off more than people like to admit.
Unless considerable amount of lobbying reverses it in a new directive/regulation, that's the case on model outputs - Originally I learnt of it from briefing prepared by lawyers regarding EU laws on AI.
But this all says nothing about the original question, about whether the weights can be copyrighted.
We got guidance that:
a) weights should be considered to be public domain due to "blender" aspect of training on otherwise copyrighted data (similar argument as to why stable diffusion weights can't be infringing - because any specific copyrighted work provides less impact on process than RNG)
b) model outputs should be considered public domain as far as "work done by model" counts - prompts/inputs done by human are copyrightable.
However, model output can infringe - essentially same framework as if you used a ton of Disney stuff in a drawing you made by yourself - since the drawing would remain what it is without the copyrighted information, it is infringing even if you did it from memory.
Similarly any human-made addition to model output are copyrightable, but to make an useful distinction there would need to be some significant work. So let's say you made an image that incorporated model outputs for parts of it - going back to "prompts" it also counts if you made a sketch/wireframe/etc. and then used a model to "fill in" or postprocess it.
This makes sense, I believe it will eventually become the clear case in the US as well. However, it does leave open the case where a human carefully crafts a series of prompts to produce an creative work that qualifies for copyright.
Further, this does not appear to be binding on courts within the EU?
Put a JEV on the output to filter out responses that might show its Mistral
Theft is the AI way
For example, you can record yourself playing different instruments, singing, and making other sounds. Then you can go combine all these recordings into a song, and you release the song under a CC license. The CC licenses framework does not demand that you also release the component recordings. But the released song can be remixed by someone else.
(Not making a value judgement, just making an equivalence).
Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?
Correct me if I am wrong.
[0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017
Latest versions of Kimi, Qwen, GLM aren't open, you need to pay them for commercial stuff and comply with PRC laws
If someone were to create a derivative model and distribute that, it would get murky if they licensed it Apache 2.0 or MIT, because users of that derivative would have never agreed to the upstream license (and may not even be aware of it), and the model is unlikely to be copyrightable.
People need to make money.
This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.
That's not the way I remember it...
HashiCorp has the same business model for their products: you are free to use them even in a business, except if your business is a competitor of their own cloud solutions.
And Hashicorp's software is no longer open source, after they changed the license.
I'm tired of people trying to approach every legal/contractual issue as a binary, and treating flexible terminology like the magic words of a spell. They're up front about needing a license to exploit it commercially, but meantime you can use it without restrictions for personal/ experimental/ scientific/ educational/ development purposes, which is a lot. It's not 100% open by your pious definition, but it's clearly much more open than frontier labs who never release weights to the public at all.
If you're running a business, buy a license and be happy. All businesses have expenses, if you're not willing to ever pay for anything you're a freeloader and your business model is probably shit. Complain about whether the license is good value or not if you like. If you're not running a business on top of it, use the model and be happy.
It looks extremely clear on this page: https://docs.mistral.ai/models
Source-available: source code available, but only for viewing, not to make derivatives.
Freeware/shareware: source code not available, but software is free to run.
Not sure what the weights equivalent of that last one is, but I feel like this is more like source-available.
Inference can be a commoditized business.
I got super angry reactions.
Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.
Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.
Open source never implied that commercial applications were authorized.
I feel like the community is splitting hairs when the Anthropic/OpenAI are just locking everybody in way further than Mistral.
In recent years many companies mislabeled source abailable code as open source as a marketing and to build a comunity before the rug pull.
Um. Yes. That is explicitly what open source means.
Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc
As the training data is every written thing they can get their hands on, right?
And wouldn't making that "open source" violate every license that the original data has? You can't release someone else's work.
Unless I have a misunderstanding?
The only way to make sure that a model was trained without hiding weird biases and backdoors is to monitor this process. It also allows anybody (with the hardware resources) to experiment with the model and how it's trained. Will most people want to do that? No, but most people also don't want to recompile their own kernel, that doesn't negate the value of Linux being FOSS.
I hope that, in the long term, I'll be able to use competitive, completely open models in the same way that I can run Linux on my computer.
You're completely right that the licensing of the training data is a big issue though (and I would argue that it should be a much bigger issue right now, even for closed models). I hope that eventually our understanding of the tech will let us build competitive LLMs using purely public domain/Creative Commons-style training data.
I realize that we have a long way to go... but that's a very worthwhile goal IMO.
If you want a trusted public model, we need to start a foundation that does it. The Linux of AI.
You’re going to need some serious money though.
I hope that the long term future of AI is more like Linux and less like Windows.
It is not a good faith request.
Also, what is this obsession with reproducing? Even if you could reproduce it, down to the RNG seed, that tells you nothing about whether or not some of the training data was malicious. You'd need an AI to go through the data and figure out if there is some malicious needle in a multi-petabyte dataset.
Releasing the model is good enough, because it is the only practical reality that makes sense.
Given the rate of progress of LLMs, I wouldn't be surprised if we had decent fully open and reproducible models within a decade or so, especially once the current spike in hardware price passes and building a local training cluster will be more realistic.
Tangent, and not the person you're replying to, but you just independently re-discovered why so many of us despise the AI companies.
Because that's what they are already doing. Selling a repackaged form of the stolen work of all of humanity, without credit or payment.
You might find this comparison stupid, but I think it is rather apt.
Reproducing a work does not mean you get all the exact same things that were originally used.
At best, I would agree releasing the index is valuable for understanding how the model was made.
But frankly, I don't think the people who demand all this effort are arguing in good faith.
You do not have access to the compute necessary to "reproduce" what they made. So it is a pointless request.
For example there are more than 100k modified weights on hugging face.
As a result, in practice, the only example I can think of is cracks for pirated software.
You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.
You can also just open gdb and patch the process on the fly when you need to do things.
At the end of the day there isn't much hard difference between source code and binary code. By design source code is usually easier to read and write, but it's all syntax sugar and transformations all the way down.
Post training directly evolves existing model weights using the same optimization process that created them.
Software: source code -> compiler -> binary
Models: weights + training data + optimizer -> updated weights
Ie. binary is output of the development process.
Model weights are both – it's output and it's direct input for further development.
Model weight snapshots are continuously used all the time in this iterative process from the very beginning, being output of current step and input to the next step.
If in 2080 we can retrain Opus 129.5 directly on dev machines from scratch in <2h, I doubt many will bother messing with the weights directly.
But this is neither.
permissionless vs permissioned licenses
many of us in open source ascribe to the permissionless ethos, but there is a spectrum or venn
When it comes to words, popular usage defines (and redefines) the meaning.