The inevitable need for an open model consortium

Interconnects · 6 months ago · 20

A consortium of companies jointly funding foundational open AI models will eventually emerge as the only sustainable path forward, replacing individual company efforts that are increasingly unaffordable. Training frontier models now costs billions of dollars rather than millions, making it economically rational for companies to either keep their best models closed for revenue or release only smaller, fine-tunable models that generate less competitive advantage. As open model development becomes financially unsustainable for individual labs, demand from companies relying on open models will drive pressure to create a shared funding mechanism where participants share costs and gain steering influence over development.