The future of foundation models

To me, a few key points seem incredibly obvious for where foundation models are trending:

• Intense competition will continue between open source and proprietary model providers. As mentioned previously, right now we are in a perfect storm of hyper-focus on foundation models from most of the technology industry worldwide. A key axis here is proprietary versus open source. As suggested by this leaked Google document on May 4 (8), the capabilities of the open source world are advancing and in many cases, open source options are better than proprietary ones. They actually describe open source models as “pound-for-pound more capable.” This means that for the size of the model itself, the smaller ones produced by the open source world are better in a per-byte-size comparison.
• Model consumers will get more options at a lower cost if they are flexible about model providers. To me, the result of this intense competition is clear; you...