The West’s open-source AI race kicks into high gear

The race in the West to become the top open-source AI model shifted into higher gear this week, as both Nvidia-backed Reflection AI and French lab Mistral unveiled new models they hope will break China’s open-source monopoly.

The challenge looming over Beam and Le Chonk ’s debuts (immediately my new favorite model name) is that they lag the top Chinese models and the leading closed systems from OpenAI and Anthropic on prominent benchmarks.

But Reflection and Mistral boasted in their announcements that they do beat other open Western models, such as those from Thinking Machines and Nvidia, suggesting the companies care just as much about the race against each other as the one with Beijing — despite US and European companies’ shifts to using more Chinese models over the past year.

Reflection CEO Misha Laskin told me his goal isn’t necessarily to dismantle the foothold Chinese models have achieved among developers and large companies. Instead, he sees a market in entities that can’t or won’t use Chinese models — think heavily regulated industries and governments — and might otherwise have no choice but to pay for closed American AI.

The timing of that pitch is opportune: Many businesses are heading into year-end budget reviews with eye-popping AI spend figures to account for. Governments are also bracing for sticker shock as $1-a-year pilot deals expire. New data from Ramp suggests companies are switching which AI providers they use more than ever.

The question that will determine the fate of these and other Western open-source players is whether businesses and agencies will tolerate less advanced models for some tasks in exchange for affordability and control.