Open-Source

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

What is open-source?

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.

Why does open-source matter?

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.