Why did open-source AI models suddenly explode in 2024?
The AI giants kept their models locked up - until a wave of open challengers proved you don't need billions to compete.
The answer
2024 saw an unprecedented wave of powerful open-source and open-weight large language models. Meta released Llama 3 (April 2024) with 8B and 70B parameter versions trained on over 15 trillion tokens. France's Mistral AI launched Mixtral 8x22B, a mixture-of-experts model rivaling GPT-3.5 at a fraction of the cost. China's Alibaba released Qwen2 models competitive with leading Western counterparts. These open models democratized AI development, allowing startups, researchers, and governments to fine-tune powerful models without depending on API providers, fundamentally shifting the power dynamics of the AI industry.
Source: Meta AI Blog
- open source
- llama
- mistral
- large language models
More from AI & Machine Learning
- What radical question did Alan Turing ask in 1950 that launched the entire field of artificial intelligence?
- Can a machine fool you into thinking it's human - and does that mean it's truly intelligent?
- What happened at a small Dartmouth workshop in 1956 that gave artificial intelligence its name?
- How did a 1958 invention called the Perceptron convince people that machines could learn like brains?
- Could a 1966 chatbot really make people believe they were talking to a therapist?
- What was the first robot that could 'reason' about its own actions?