The current balance of power in open models - Interconnects AI

Interconnects AI has surveyed the open-model field and delivered the finding that Meta's Llama, Alibaba's Qwen, Google's Gemma and DeepSeek's models are the most common form of open models — a revelation roughly on par with discovering that the most common form of bread is sliced. The line worth reading twice sits beside it: the leading Chinese models GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have enacted 'a step change in the commercial viability of open models.' Not a step change in licensing clarity. Not in safety documentation. Commercial viability — the one metric where 'open' quietly becomes 'monetised.'

Note the omissions. Four families get named as the usual suspects, but the two credited with moving the economics carry version numbers that read like firmware patches: GLM-5.2, Kimi K3. No parameter counts, no licence terms, no benchmark table in the excerpt — just a confident assertion that the ground shifted. The 'step change' is asserted, not costed. The open-model crowd has been told every release for two years was 'the moment'; the actual moment, if it landed, was probably first noticed by whoever was quoting the API price.

The darker read is unglamorous. When open weights become commercially viable, distribution stops being a hobbyist's problem and becomes a supply-chain problem — every downstream fine-tune, every enterprise wrapper, every contractor with a spare GPU cluster and a grievance. Llama and Gemma gave the field its first taste of that; Qwen and DeepSeek made it routine; GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have, per Interconnects, apparently made it pay. So the balance of power is now a commercial question, which means the next argument won't be about whether the weights exist. It will be about who invoices for them, and who gets politely asked to stop. Progress, of a sort, with a receipt attached.