How Far Behind Are Open-weight AI Models?

Jonathan Siddharth says open-weight models are about three to six months behind the frontier, depending on who you ask. Enterprises are picking them up because the models are getting good enough for a company to own its own implementation.

He wants frontier AI and sovereign AI together, not a contest with one winner. Frontier labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, are pushing superintelligence he thinks could help cure diseases, discover new materials, and colonize space. Plenty of company work does not need a trillion-parameter model. An invoice-to-pay reconciliation, an HR workflow, a board deck, or an all-hands can sit on a custom model tuned to the company's own data, tools, and taste. Open-weight models let the company keep that system, and the learning in it, instead of handing the identity of the workflow to a rival. Thinking Machines and Reflection AI are among the open efforts he names.