Patel predicts open source will match GPT-4 but frontier models will continue advancing beyond it.
“Open source will match GPT-four, but then it's like, what about GPT-four Vision? Or what about five and six and all these kind of stuff?”
Patel argues open source AI lacks software's feedback loops because reusing models requires significant compute and expertise.
“fundamentally, I would say that that's because open source AI does not have the same feedback loops as open source software.”
Patel says open source AI definition is still being defined, unlike software's established freedoms for modification and use.
“So for what I do, I work at the Allen Institute for AI. We're a nonprofit. We want to make AI open for everybody,”
Patel says many entities can afford 100x DeepSeek's $5 million cost, ensuring open models will continue emerging.
“DeepSeek has this shocking $5,000,000 number. Think about how many entities in the world can afford a 100 times that to have the best open source model that people use in the world.”
Patel predicts China will stop open sourcing AI models once ahead and closed source will ultimately win.
“China's open sourcing stuff only because they're behind the moment they're ahead, they will stop open sourcing stuff. And at the end of the day, closed source will win. Unfortunately, closed source will win.”
Patel notes OpenAI is releasing custom kernels with model weights so everyone has optimized inference day one.
“Make your own inference implementation, But OpenAI is, like, actually, like, dropping the model weights and, like, all these custom kernels for people to implement in inference.”
Patel announces InferenceMax is completely open source under Apache 2.0 license for full transparency.
“InferenceMax is aiming to change all of that in the benchmarking space. So it's completely transparent in that it's completely open source, Apache 2.0 license.”
Patel claims all good open source models are Chinese, with American and French models being terrible.
“American open source models are terrible. French open source models. Well, Mistral just stopped open sourcing models really. Are there any of the good ones? So it's it's all Chinese open source models.”
Patel reports both US and Chinese governments unhappy about Chinese open-source models benefiting American companies more than Chinese ones.
“There have been reports in China about the Chinese government not so happy that American companies are profiting more from Chinese open source models than Chinese companies are.”
“Base Ten, like Tuhin's probably made more money off of, you know, Minimax or GLM or DeepSeq than those companies have because he's serving those models at scale. And same with, Linett Fireworks.”
DeepSeek R1 generated attention in January 2025 but was not used for economically valuable work.
“The past two months have been a breakout period for open source AI. Yes, there was the “DeepSeek moment” back in January 2025, but no one actually used R1 to do any economically valuable work.”
Forecasting the future gap between open and closed AI models requires measuring historical performance differences.
“To project how the open vs closed capability gap will progress in the future, we first need to measure the past.”
Open models staying competitive at lower cost raises fears that the model layer will become commoditized.
“However, major FUD has also emerged as a result of open model success : if open models stay capable enough relative to the closed frontier at a fraction of the cost, won't the model layer become commoditized?”