Open-weight AI still follows an old business playbook, Kevin Xu says
kevinsxu · x · 2026-07-29
The author says they are sharing thoughts from a couple of New York Times stories about how open-source works in the AI era.
Their core point is that there is still confusion about how open-weight models or open-source AI makes money, but the playbook is not new:
- the technology may be novel
- the business model and packaging around open models are not
- the economic implications follow patterns that have existed in open source before
The post frames open AI as a business-model problem more than a technology problem.
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