The War Between Open Source, Open Weight, and Closed AI Models
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Enterprises face the same proprietary-versus-open choice with AI models they faced with software.
The article maps the three-way split in AI model distribution: closed proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight models from Meta and Mistral, and fully open-source options such as NVIDIA's Nemotron.
Enterprises face a choice structurally similar to the one they made decades ago with software, between investing in proprietary solutions and adopting open alternatives that give more control.
Meta's shifting stance on open-sourcing its models and NVIDIA's comparatively generous Nemotron releases show how differently vendors are positioning.
The conclusion is that if open models keep improving through distillation and knowledge sharing, hardware suppliers like NVIDIA benefit most as model differentiation erodes.