If local models are good enough, who funds the next generation of frontier models?
Ok-Direction-4480 · reddit · 2026-09-17
A Reddit user poses a paradox: open models like Qwen 27B are good enough for most tasks, but if nobody pays for APIs, labs like OpenAI and Anthropic lose the revenue needed to train new models. Local models eventually become outdated, like 'using a model from 1930'. The open question: how can the community itself train up-to-date models when only compute-rich labs can build competitive ones?
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