Open Models Now 4 Months Behind Frontier, Handle 56% of Vercel Gateway Tokens
bigdata · x · 2026-09-28
Gradient Flow's Ben Lorica lays out six reasons open AI models will win:
- Gap shrinking: the open-vs-proprietary performance gap is now 4 months; "good enough + cheap" wins most workloads.
- Economics: one comparison found an open model matching two Anthropic models at 1/5 the cost per completed task.
- Production shift: open models served 56% of tokens on Vercel's AI Gateway in August (up from 7% in December) while accounting for just 14% of estimated spend.
- Infrastructure control: open weights let teams choose deployment, customize, and lock validated versions, avoiding price changes, model retirements, and vendor competition with customers.
Lorica likens it to Linux displacing Solaris.
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