Open Weight Models Explained for Everyone

CJ: And a model is basically the thing you get access to when you go to chat.openai.com or gemini.google.com or claude.ai. And a model is a standalone thing created by an AI lab. [...] the end result of all of that upfront analyzing of all of that data is a single file that predicts words. It's not a server farm, it's not a computer, it's not a program running on a computer, it's a file with trillions or billions of numbers inside of it. [...] The model file itself is not connected to the internet. It was essentially created by analyzing the occurrence and relationships of every word on the internet. And so, the model file has all of that information embedded inside of it as a collection of numbers. You could think of it like an encyclopedia that predicts words, but it's not connected to anything. It can't access the internet. It is literally just a file that when run through some other program, predicts words.

CJ: All of these Chinese AI labs also offer up what are known as open weight models, which is like publishing their recipes online. And when they do that, that actually means you can download these open weight models to run them on your own computer or your own hardware or your own servers in the cloud. [...] Some AI labs make it so that other companies and people can take that model and then run it on their own systems. And then they provide API access to end users and applications. And one of the biggest examples of this is Microsoft Foundry. They actually give you API access to many different open weight models when you sign up for their service. And so if you go to ai.azure.com, you actually can get access to GLM 5.2 or Kimmy K 2.5, which are all models that were created by Chinese labs. But when you're interacting with those models, none of your data is actually traveling to China. Your data is only traveling between you and Microsoft or whatever company is hosting these open weight models. And when you access models in this way, the creator of that model has no idea that you're even interacting with that model.

CJ: There was a recent study done by Booz Allen Hamilton trying to determine, do these Chinese models, even if we're running them ourselves, let's say we're not talking to them hosted in China, do they have inherent biases? [...] The result of that study says, in short, yes. On all accounts, our testing revealed two core findings. One, Chinese LLMs produce more vulnerable code when prompted with a US government persona than without. And the vulnerabilities are highly obfuscated. Two, Chinese LLMs inject PRC-aligned political bias into both the answers and the code they generate. So, that means if you're using an AI model, again, even if you host it yourself, no data is going to China, but you're using it locally, it's possible that it might actually introduce vulnerabilities into your code.