Giving away or offering lower cost AI models help keep users in the Google ecosystem, which is very financially lucrative for Google with its ad sales related to its search engine.
It's a much cheaper way to run a freemium pricing plan than to give out actual time on a real GPU.
The free models aren't as advanced as the commercial ones, so you still need to pay to get better service. Many companies do this by hosting the smaller models for free, and charging for access to the bigger ones, but the costs of running even the small models adds up, so if they can get you to run it on your own hardware, they save a lot on GPU time, but still get the advertising exposure of a freemium pricing plan.
I think it's about convention and adoption - "first taste is free" to get as many ppl as possible accustomed (read: addicted) to using GenAI. Plus most majors are currently releasing open weight models.
...but i suspect few to none will continue releasing free and open models when they start cutting too deeply into token profits.
We'll likely see smaller open models, but few who have the resources to train large, frontier sized models will want to do so for free... maybe China, but they're also a dubious choice for many.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 24.0 ms ] threadThe free models aren't as advanced as the commercial ones, so you still need to pay to get better service. Many companies do this by hosting the smaller models for free, and charging for access to the bigger ones, but the costs of running even the small models adds up, so if they can get you to run it on your own hardware, they save a lot on GPU time, but still get the advertising exposure of a freemium pricing plan.
...but i suspect few to none will continue releasing free and open models when they start cutting too deeply into token profits.
We'll likely see smaller open models, but few who have the resources to train large, frontier sized models will want to do so for free... maybe China, but they're also a dubious choice for many.