An opinion piece in the WSJ written by the CTO of Mozilla points to a divergence in AI:
The market is splitting in two. The narrow slice is the frontier, and the American models of this kind are the best in the world. … The frontier needs to thrive.
But it also is a narrow slice of the AI world. The broader slice is the everyday: the coding, the instruction-following and the bulk of real workloads. Mozilla’s first “State of Open Source AI” report found open-weight models near parity in cost, with prices massively down over the past three years. That broad everyday slice is the critical infrastructure for AI, and it needs to work by a different set of rules. A permission-based model is a fine way to buy excellence. But it is wildly inappropriate for the ordinary uses of AI.
Further driving this shift is the government’s involvement in frontier models:
The Commerce Department on June 12 barred any foreign national from using Anthropic’s latest frontier models without a license. Since Anthropic couldn’t verify users’ nationalities in real time, it turned the models off for everyone. Every buyer everywhere learned that the most capable artificial intelligence on the market has a shutdown switch.