Have Open Models Overtaken Closed Models?

Misha Laskin says the mix of tokens on model gateways has flipped from mostly closed to mostly open, and he thinks the shift will only accelerate. About six months ago, a gateway such as OpenRouter or Vercel was majority closed and minority open, almost exactly 70 percent closed and 30 percent open. The split is now almost exactly 70 percent open and 30 percent closed.

He suspects the world will look much like operating systems, where 95 percent or more of servers and computers run an open source operating system such as Linux. Closed products can still be extremely valuable. Microsoft and Apple are extremely valuable companies, and the market is really big. He thinks most token demand will go to open models, and that a lot of the economic value will go to open models too.

The reason is that everything else required to run a model stays expensive. Even a fully permissive model, or one with a license on it, still needs costly compute. Hardware accelerators such as GPUs are a more expensive compute substrate than CPUs.