Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, and others brought public weights near closed-API performance, redefining “frontier.”
With Llama 3/4 and European and Chinese variants, the gap between closed API and downloadable checkpoint narrowed on many public benchmarks.
Enterprises adopted hybrid stacks: closed for the tip, open for data control and cost. Regulators debated whether open weights need different rules.
The race is no longer only who has the best model, but who defines the deployment ecosystem.
New Llama generations improved multimodality and agents while keeping downloadable weights as industrial strategy.
Meta released LLaMA and, after a leak, catalyzed an open fine-tune ecosystem that challenged closed APIs.
Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok inside X, betting on a distinct personality and realtime social data.