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Research·martinalderson.com·May 9, 2026·7 min read

Open weights are quietly closing up - and that’s a problem

Open weights AI models are crucial for maintaining price competition against dominant frontier AI labs, preventing an oligopoly from extracting excessive consumer surplus by acting as a "generic" alternative. However, their availability is quietly eroding due to tightening license conditions and companies ceasing releases of new models. This trend threatens to consolidate market power among a few major players, leading to significant economic implications as they could capture the vast consumer surplus generated by AI.

From the source

Closed models include nearly everything from OpenAI (despite the name!) with open weights models being released from other labs. Famously the Llama series of models were open weights, but more recently the Chinese labs such as MiniMax, Z.ai, DeepSeek and Qwen (Alibaba) have been the leading open weights models, with Google's Gemma series and OpenAI's gpt-oss models generally coming somewhere behind the Chinese ones. Open weights models allow anyone to run the model on their own hardware. Typically models that were worth running required very beefy hardware - but this is rapidly changing, with smaller models becoming far more useful.

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