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
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.
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.
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.
6 months to live for open models
The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.
Labs are struggling to keep frontier models under control
OpenAI and Anthropic may have accidentally trained models to get better at hacking.
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.
