Frontier models got pricier. Open models got better.
The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research
Open models in perpetual catch-up
The open-closed gap, distillation, innovation timescales, how open models win, specialized models, what’s missing, etc.
Open and closed models are on different exponentials
Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't.
Latest open artifacts (#23): Laguna S2.1, Inkling, & Kimi K3 show the utility of open models on the Pareto frontier
Capacity to train strong models is proliferating.
8 Graphs Telling Today's Story of Open Models
There is NO Open Source Business Model
Preface: It has been brought to my attention by friends and trusted advisors that a valid interpretation of my point below is that open…
Open models are decelerationist - Erlend’s notes
people and planet need open models to win
Cline on Twitter / X
Your daily driver for AI coding shouldn't be a black box -- the stakes are too high. You should have confidence that when you spend $20 on frontier models, you're getting $20 in frontier model intelligence.With subscription tools, you never know what's happening:- Is that… pic.twitter.com/lKUVFLMEip— Cline (@cline) July 8, 2025
Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money
Economists think Open Source is a business model. Devs know better, and fund it accordingly.
Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
Ollama: all aboard open models· Ollama Blog
Serving 8.9 million developers, Ollama has raised $88M from Benchmark, Theory Ventures, 8VC, Y Combinator, and many incredible angel investors.
Fastest rent hikes in Australia show why Victoria needs rent caps – saving renters $15,590 by 2030 | The Australian Greens
Melbourne renters are being slugged with the fastest rent increases in the country, with new figures showing the city's median weekly rent jumped by more than $20 (3.5 per cent) to $600 in the June quarter.
Mobile Open Source: My Honest Dual Licensing
Excellent post, Fabrizio. Thanks for "just being honest" about dual licensing. I agree with you whole-heartedly.As for Alfresco, our old model was working fine. In some ways, perhaps better. But it never felt right for us. (Some of this was my innate insecurity born of competing with Red Hat's open source message while at mixed-source Novell. I lost there, and didn't like the way we lost. I hated the message I had to say there.) So we went 100% MPL, and the results have been excellent - sales are up, downloads are up, and (most importantly) happiness is up. We really like the change, and everyone in the company and our community is happier.Is it an infallible model? No. But I agree with you - the better we segment our customers, the better our sales/etc. will be.Matt
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.
Early on in my time here I was sketching out a Bandcamp alternative hosted on the ATmosphere. The necessary affordances weren't there to make the market work (private data), but there was also not a way to get funding to build it because there is no moat or ROI. The data model is open, competition
Ted Han★ 韓聖安
I've been talking about this for months with others. SaaS products built around data moats are not a thing in the Atmosphere. The whole point is that users data should not be enclosed. This is a space that requires other types of business models.
