Open-Source

Software or AI models whose underlying code or weights are publicly available — anyone can inspect, modify, and use them, often for free.

Open-source means the inner workings are public. For software, the source code is published under a license that allows reuse and modification; for AI models, the trained weights are released so others can run, study, or adapt them.

For AI, open models such as Llama and Mistral let companies run AI on their own infrastructure, fine-tune for their use case, and avoid depending on a single vendor's API — and researchers can audit how models behave and what they were trained on. The trade-offs: open models may trail the best closed models in raw capability, and running them yourself requires technical skill and compute.

"Open" doesn't always mean unrestricted — some licenses limit commercial use or require attribution. The core promise holds: visibility and control that closed systems don't offer.