> "Open weights" borrows the legitimacy of open source

I don't really see how open-weights models need to borrow any legitimacy. They are valuable artifacts being given away that can be used, tested and repurposed forever. Fully open models like the OLMo series and Nvidia's Nemotron are much more valuable in some contexts, but they haven't quite cracked the level of performance that the best open-weights models are hitting. And I think that's why most startups are reaching for Chinese base LLMs when they want to tune custom models: the performance is better and they were never going to bother with pretraining anyway.

But the end results aren’t actually close. That is why frontier LLMs don’t know you need to drive your car to the car wash (until they are inevitably fine-tuned on this specific failure mode). I don’t think there is much true generalization happening with these models - more a game of whack-a-mole all the way down.

Correct. Anthropic keeps pushing these weird sci-fi narratives to maintain some kind of mystique around their slightly-better-than-others commodity product. But Occam’s Razor is not dead.

Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.