What Are Open Weight AI Models?

What Are Open Weight AI Models?

There are three approaches to developing large language models, open source (which more people should be familiar with) open weight, and closed source. Open weight language models make public their learning parameters, offering some transparency to the model's behavior.

This is in contrast to the more transparent open source models, which make learning parameters public along with training data, architecture, and algorithms. Meanwhile, Open weight models keep those details proprietary.

Close source or closed models, as I'm sure you can guess, offer no transparency as to these details of how their AI systems work. These three forms of AI technology constitute a philosophical debate in the field where most people seem to side with open source AI to be most beneficial to humanity.

Some open weight models people are familiar with may be Meta's Llama and Mistral, both very powerful engines that have been used to make new systems, including DeepSeek.

Advantages and Disadvantages to Open Weight Models

Open Weight Models carry with them certain advantages, including:

• Flexibility: Users can customize a models weights to suit their needs without having to start from scratch.

• Accessibility: Users have a smaller barrier to entry for using advanced AI tools.

• Speed of deployment: Open weight models can be deployed quickly, which is part of the reason OpenAI has chosen to release one so soon after DeepSeek.

• Easy for developers: If AI developers don't have extensive expertise, open weight models still allow them to leverage the model to their specific tasks.

There are also disadvantages to open weight models as well though, including:

• Dependency: Open weight models rely on the tools provided by the parent AI system and can't necessarily be fined tuned to anything beyond that use.

• Limited transparency: Although learning parameters gives insight to users, a model's training data and algorithm are still needed to fully understand how it performs AI research.

• Possibility for Misuse: Some professions speculate that open weight models can be leveraged by bad actors to be used in cyberattacks and even creating biological and chemical weapons. Though OpenAI claims the model will undergo extensive training to ensure that won't happen.

OpenAI's Upcoming Open Weight Model

Ever since the release of DeepSeek AI shook San Francisco, OpenAI has been forced to look into different ways to out-innovate the Chinese software. So, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed earlier this week that his company will release an open weight AI model in the next couple months.

If you are a developer and want to use OpenAI's upcoming open weight model, they posted a link inviting you to try it out. In the meantime, the rest of us have to wait and see what will become of this new system. Perhaps someone will leverage it and make the next DeepSeek AI themselves.