Paul Graham: Open-weight model shift among startups is a real trend, says Ollama usage up 150x
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-04
- Paul Graham confirms that the shift back toward open-weight models he noticed among YC's summer-batch startups is a genuine trend.
- The context is YC's Lightcone interview with Ollama co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan: Ollama is now used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500.
- Morgan's read: the biggest shift is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and open capabilities rapidly closing in on frontier labs — Ollama Cloud token usage has grown 150x since the start of the year.
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