RedMonk: Open Weight Models Already Match the Capability That Changed the Industry
rseroter · x · 2026-09-05
RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady published an essay on how to think about open weight models, tracing their history and current standing.
- History: models were open before they were closed — AlexNet shipped open weights in 2012, Caffe Zoo was a proto-Hugging Face in 2014, and ELMo and GPT-1 both released weights; GPT-2 was the first withheld model (initially over safety concerns, weights released nine months later)
- Why closed: not just safety — commercial vendors closing models creates scarcity to monetize; today the best-performing US models are all closed
- Core takeaway: open weight models already have the level of capability that changed the industry, and they're only getting better
The essay draws an analogy to the open source software era — a good primer on the open vs. closed model debate.
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