Mozilla report: best open AI model trails closed leader by 3 points at 60% of the price

mmitchell_ai · x · 2026-09-16

Mozilla's The State of Open Source AI v1.1 (Sept 2026), with a foreword by CTO Raffi Krikorian, maps where open AI is winning and exposed.

Best open model trails the closed leader by only 3 points while costing 60% of the price; the gap resets each release cycle.
"Open weights" ≠ open source: none of the 16 notable open releases ships the data recipe the OSI definition requires.
Case studies: Māori speech models licensed so data stays with communities, offline cassava-disease diagnosis in East Africa, and Switzerland's fully open national model.
In six weeks, a major US lab returned to open weights and Washington debated (and declined) a ban.

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