PredictionArticle
A safer bet than consolidation is predicting continued adoption of open models, and the ecosystem is entering a decisive era over how far open models can go.
Weighing the sustained pace of Chinese labs and new entrants like Xiaomi, the author now favors predicting continued adoption of open models and questions how far revenue-share licenses and open models can go. ✦ AI generated
The author of 'Latest open artifacts (#23)...' · Interconnects · 2026-08-02 · original ↗
On the other side of the ecosystem is the sustained pace from the Chinese labs, with newer entrants like Xiaomi still accumulating mindshare in the broader AI economy. Having predicted consolidation for a long time, it now seems like a safer bet is to predict continued adoption, and try to imagine the role that open models play there. How much can revenue-share licenses like Kimi K3 stick? How much market share can open models take? We’re entering the decisive era.
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Evidence · 5
Despite predictions of consolidation, more companies are training strong models and an increasing number of organizations are releasing these models openly.The author of 'Latest open artifacts (#23)...' · Interconnects · conf 90%Thinking Machines has become a leading open-weight model company in the USA, with its open model finetuning service generating hundreds of millions in revenue per year.The author of 'Latest open artifacts (#23)...' · Interconnects · conf 85%Building token machines is a likely path to value, so labs that were expected to consolidate are instead finding value in continued operation.The author of 'Latest open artifacts (#23)...' · Interconnects · conf 80%The open model ecosystem has professionalized significantly — model weights now ship with vLLM patches and partner integrations, unlike a year ago when the community had to figure everything out from scratch.Florian Brand · Interconnects · conf 80%99% of inference volume by count still comes from traditional enterprise workloads that haven't adopted AI yet, meaning the vast majority of the market is still ahead of us.Tuhin Srivastava · No Priors · conf 70%