A year ago, a San Francisco gathering many called the “Woodstock of AI” brought together 5,000 devotees of “open-source” AI models—that is, where the underlying code, and sometimes the model weights and training methods, are publicly available for researchers and developers to build on. The event, hosted by open source AI hub Hugging Face and featuring live llamas (in a nod to Meta’s Llama model) kicked off an open-source AI boom that hasn’t let up since. The landscape now includes unicorn startups such as Mistral and Together AI, and boasts a constant barrage of new open-source AI models that are getting ever closer to beating OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4 at various performance benchmarks.Just over the past couple of weeks, there were open-source LLM releases from top companies like Databricks, Cerebras, AI21, and Cohere. However, a recent survey by venture capital firm a16z found that for large companies adopting generative AI, OpenAI’s closed, proprietary models remain the most popular by far—particularly for use cases actually put into production. But it also showed signs of change: Six months ago, for instance, most organizations were experimenting with just one model—mostly from OpenAI—and most stuck to common use cases in areas like marketing, coding, and customer support. But in 2024, they are opening up to experimenting with more AI model options—that are often open-source. Sarah Wang, an a16z general partner who coauthored the survey, said OpenAI’s biggest advantage up until now has been that of first mover. In addition, it has been tough to push off its top perch, she explained, because for most of the past year, GPT-4 has also been considered the best model available, as well as easy to access directly through an API or via Microsoft Azure. “I think it was the easiest to plug and play and to say, ‘This model is the best; let’s just see what use cases come out of it,’” she noted. The survey put the 2023 market share of closed-source models at an estimated 80% to 90%, with the majority of share going to OpenAI. No updated market share was provided for this year, but 46% of respondents mentioned that they prefer or strongly prefer open-source models.
Full report : How OpenAI’s ChatGPT is withstanding the open source AI chatbots onslaught.
