The state of open source AI

From Māori language preservation to cassava disease diagnosis in East Africa, organizations are building and owning open AI models on their own hardware without paying per-token fees, arguing this mirrors the open web movement that defeated proprietary control. The article reports that open models now handle a majority of production tokens and dominate high-volume usage on platforms like OpenRouter, even though closed models still lead on advanced reasoning tasks. It positions open AI as the path to competition and interoperability, allowing users to own their models and walk away from any vendor.