Who Actually Wants Open Weights, Anyway?

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/LocalLLaMA titled, more or less, “why do Americans lag so far behind in open LLMs”. The poster’s logic ran like this: DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, the Chinese labs are shipping open weight models constantly, and the big American labs mostly aren’t. Shouldn’t that bother people more than it seems to?

I don’t know the full answer, but the comment section did a pretty good job of thrashing out the possibilities, and it’s more interesting than “China good, America bad” or the reverse.

The most upvoted reply was a one-liner: “Have you even thought of shareholder value!?” Which got a laugh, but it’s also just… correct, as far as it goes. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning enormous amounts of investor money trying to build a moat. Releasing your weights for free is a strange thing to do when your entire pitch to investors is “we have something nobody else has.” Meanwhile several commenters made the point that Chinese labs are playing a different game entirely: undermine the moat, get the brand and the ecosystem (sorry, had to use the word once) of casual usage normalised, and let the market follow. One person compared it to FreeSync killing G-Sync’s premium by just being good enough and free. That one stuck with me, because it’s such a boringly ordinary business strategy dressed up as ideology on both sides of the argument.

There was also a less flattering theory floating around: that a lot of the open Chinese models are themselves distilled from the frontier American labs, riding on innovation they didn’t pay for, and that the “free and open” framing is partly a marketing trick to obscure that. Could be true. I’ve got no way to verify it from my spare room in the outer southeast, and neither, really, does anyone in that thread. What I noticed is how quickly a reasonable technical question (why the asymmetry in open releases) turned into a referendum on which country is the baddie. That happens on every thread like this now, and it’s exhausting, because it crowds out the actually interesting bit, which is that “open” doesn’t mean the same thing as “altruistic.” It can be a competitive weapon and still be genuinely useful to me, a bloke running quantised models on a MacBook to keep my own data off someone else’s server. Both things are true at once. Nobody in that thread wanted to sit with that; they wanted a villain.

I’ll admit a soft spot for the open weight stuff regardless of why it exists. I’ve mucked around with a few locally hosted models over the past year, partly out of curiosity about the tech, partly because I like the idea of not shipping every stray thought through a subscription API somewhere in Virginia. There was another post in the same subreddit this week, someone turning their iPhone into a second GPU to speed up prefill on a MacBook. Completely impractical, mildly ridiculous, and also the exact kind of tinkering that open weights make possible. You don’t get that with a closed API. You get a terms-of-service agreement.

Where this lands for me, and it’s not a tidy landing, is that I’m glad open models exist, I don’t think the people releasing them are doing it out of civic virtue, and both of those things can sit next to each other without resolving into a clean story. The Americans-versus-China framing misses that this is a market doing normal market things: undercut the leader, capture the ecosystem, worry about monetising it later. It’s not a morality play, even though everyone on Reddit, myself included on a bad day, would prefer it was.

What actually worries me more than who’s “winning” is the energy bill nobody in that thread mentioned once. Every one of these models, open or closed, Chinese or American, gets trained in a data centre drawing power that has to come from somewhere, and increasingly that somewhere is gas peaker plants brought back online because the grid can’t keep up. We’ll happily argue for three hundred comments about geopolitics and shareholder value, and not once ask what any of this costs the planet to produce. That seems like the bigger oversight. Worth sitting with, even without a clean answer at the end of it.