This new trend of content appearing while scrolling down is so terrible accessibility-wise, I do not understand how Mozilla of all institutions would do it.
Not every trend needs to be followed. Have some backbone. You receive donations to have that.
___
Apart from the website being - frankly - bullshit, the content is also - frankly - bullshit.
It's just on the frontpage because the title says "open source AI".
It appears open models were used to create this slop.
That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp.
Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like:
Open ships easy.
Open deploys hard.
What?! Is it a meta answer to "the state of open source AI" question?
Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device.
The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have sweatily argued on this forum. Personally, I'm not convinced there's much of a difference between these models at this point. The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful.
I agree with your speculation to be honest. And yet I’ve tried several local open weights model now and none gives the same quality of answers as Claude gives me on a regular Sonnet model. Mind you: I am “running” 48GB of RAM so I can’t try every model. Where does this difference come from? Can we actually get close locally?
You do realize OpenAI survived for years without LLMs, right? There is still more AI research they can do as a lab even if they stop experimenting with LLMs.
I think this is possibly true, but the other piece of the equation is tooling. Right now, Anthropic has by far the best tooling around (for both SWEs and non-technical users), and a huge ecosystem of integrated ISVs. I'm not suggesting it will happen, but if Anthropic decided to provide options of using models beyond Claude, they'd still have a significant moat.
> open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI.
Maybe killing Anthropic is a good thing? Anthropic believe that they are the moral god and they get to determine what we can do and can't do, and they get to tell us what model to use and what not to use. I find it very counterproductive.
Are frontier models actually astronomically expensive to train? GLM 5.2 was trained on ~30T tokens, so ~10^25 FLOPs. Say you get B300's for $5/h (pretty high), and you get 50% MFU; that's ~$15M. Of course there's also a bunch of risk that the training itself goes badly, post-training, etc. But still, compared to the inference spend after, it's not that crazy.
There’s not much of a difference because open models are distilling from frontier models. If frontier models cease to exist then many of these open models will as well
Speculation: Cheapest AI inference supply chain will win. Chips and energy. The chinese have made large investments in nuclear that will take decades for the US to follow and US has Chip supply chains that will take a few years for the Chinese to follow.
We are probably at the 3T to 5T parameter models which are good enough for disruption.Given the supply chains we can probably expect paced improvements, unless somebody comes up with better training methodologies or mathematics.
The UI is really hard on the eyes. Personally, I think the font size is way too big, and the animation timing feels off. If this is a benchmark page and not a product page, I feel like the information should be scannable at a glance. The UX is bad.
I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.
We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.
If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.
The design and layout made it harder to read than it needed to be.
Regardless, the inference costs dropping almost 50× is really amazing to see. And now Kimi K3 release has shown how open models are getting closer to the frontier level already. Open source AI is moving a lot faster than Anthropic and OpenAI would have expected lol.
The issue is that all of the text is a quote, and that renders enormous. That’s probably fine for a tiny quote amongst more text, but here it is jarring.
There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models.
All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists?
Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things.
Open-source is and has been amazing but its so hard to deploy reliably and at scale and there's still big problems in the underlying models with instruction following and tool calling that makes it basically unusable for production workloads at a decent price point...
> Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community rose up to make sure it never could.
I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this article
It sure is nice to see that Mozilla is still doing all that they can to keep on top of current trends, except developing a decent privacy-focused web browser for developers and power users.
This used to be my attitude, but I do feel like Firefox has made good ground in 2026.
I've also become sympathetic to their AI strategy. They don't seem delusional in their approach. They're not building models or selling slop, they're building OSS compatibility layers.
I don't want to see a world of vertically locked AI, so if Mozilla truly can dust off the old playbook for OSS AI, we'll all be better off for it.
Haven't been following the articles and snippets we get from these labs about training their models for a while. But I'm guessing the latest chinese models are way less based on distilling? If not, then your speed of progress is still limited by the two labs (which we are collectively, in various forms subsidizing).
Exactly 4 months ago, the marketshare on openrouter was 60%-40% in favor of closed models. Now it's 63%-37% in favor of open models. On March 19th, the open models processed 888B tokens in aggregate, yesterday, they processed 4.19T tokens in aggregate. That's almost 5x in 4 months! I can't think of the right intensifier to describe this level of growth.
If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter data), I built a dashboard that updates daily: https://dirac.run/labs-market-share
There isn't any open-source AI. There is Open AI (not to be confused with the closed company called OpenAI, which was unable to trademark its name). There's no open source AI both because the open source community doesn't have the resources to train a useful AI and because AI doesn't have source code.
I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. There are projects to train competent modern LLMs in which the entire pipeline (data, training process, final weights) is all completely transparent, shared, and reproducible by anyone with the compute to try it out.
Or is your definition of "open source" mean that a small indie dev should be able to reproduce the entire pipeline? Because that would disqualify more than just LLMs, but also hardware platforms like Arduino where you need to pay for manufacturing to get the underlying stuff built... is Arduino "open source?"
As someone that's generally for the proliferation of open models, I want to take this seriously, but it's really difficult when it was clearly written by AI.
I guess they fired whoever used to write copy for these things.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to just dunk on them, I think it's actively hurting their own point to do this, and counter-productive when people can easily clock it - it makes some percent of the audience immediately tune out.
Seems quite odd to use OpenRouter as “proof” that open weights models won. If you’re using OpenRouter, you’re already looking to bypass frontier models. To suggest there’s no longer a tradeoff simply isn’t true. But this isn’t the first time I thought Mozilla was a less than trustworthy source of information.
Gemini had a pop-up on my phone today, asking me if I wanted to "bring Gemini up to speed" by importing conversations from my other AI apps. This tells me that Google is threatened, or data hungry as always, or both. Open source AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, knocking on doors.
71 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadNot every trend needs to be followed. Have some backbone. You receive donations to have that.
___
Apart from the website being - frankly - bullshit, the content is also - frankly - bullshit.
It's just on the frontpage because the title says "open source AI".
That opening is so hard to understand what they are trying to say, from the font and how it's written. It took me several times rereading to even grasp.
Plus the article is filled with cryptic things like:
What?! Is it a meta answer to "the state of open source AI" question?The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have sweatily argued on this forum. Personally, I'm not convinced there's much of a difference between these models at this point. The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful.
Maybe killing Anthropic is a good thing? Anthropic believe that they are the moral god and they get to determine what we can do and can't do, and they get to tell us what model to use and what not to use. I find it very counterproductive.
At least some honesty here
We are probably at the 3T to 5T parameter models which are good enough for disruption.Given the supply chains we can probably expect paced improvements, unless somebody comes up with better training methodologies or mathematics.
I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.
We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.
If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.
Regardless, the inference costs dropping almost 50× is really amazing to see. And now Kimi K3 release has shown how open models are getting closer to the frontier level already. Open source AI is moving a lot faster than Anthropic and OpenAI would have expected lol.
There's nothing practical about open-source models yet that makes them even remotely comparable to closed frontier models.
All the hype around GLM, Qwen, now Kimi.... Are people really this naive that they believe these reports or, more worringly, are people NOT using these models and seeing the HUGE gap that still exists?
Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things.
Open-source is and has been amazing but its so hard to deploy reliably and at scale and there's still big problems in the underlying models with instruction following and tool calling that makes it basically unusable for production workloads at a decent price point...
the pdf is easier to read
I'd say that the front door to the web is pretty much owned by Google and Apple at this point given Firefox current marketshare. And maybe that's enough, maybe a future where a low percentage of open models keep the rest of the system honest but that doesn't seem the argument of this article
I've also become sympathetic to their AI strategy. They don't seem delusional in their approach. They're not building models or selling slop, they're building OSS compatibility layers.
I don't want to see a world of vertically locked AI, so if Mozilla truly can dust off the old playbook for OSS AI, we'll all be better off for it.
If you are looking for more details (as inferred by openrouter data), I built a dashboard that updates daily: https://dirac.run/labs-market-share
If I'm using OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google models, I'm probably using their API directly, so OpenRouter won't have those stats to compare to.
All that said, it is very exciting to see open model usage grow via OpenRouter.
Or is your definition of "open source" mean that a small indie dev should be able to reproduce the entire pipeline? Because that would disqualify more than just LLMs, but also hardware platforms like Arduino where you need to pay for manufacturing to get the underlying stuff built... is Arduino "open source?"
I guess they fired whoever used to write copy for these things.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to just dunk on them, I think it's actively hurting their own point to do this, and counter-productive when people can easily clock it - it makes some percent of the audience immediately tune out.