Why Did American Companies Skip Free Frontier Models?

Anastasios Angelopoulos says American companies largely skipped giving frontier models away, because spending $5 billion to train one and then releasing it free sounds like a stupid idea. Chinese companies can make a release like that because corporate dynamics in China are different. In the US the open problem was how to earn back the money spent on training.

People are trying two approaches. One is a license that is partly open source, with revenue thresholds. If a product using the model clears $20 million in revenue, the lab takes a revenue share, and an inference provider that wants to serve the model shares revenue as well. The other approach, becoming more common at Reflection and Mistral, is to offer the model as open source, get inside companies, and build an AI modernization business around the model.

A path toward getting paid is starting to show. Earlier, monetizing the model was not clear.